


Afterglow

by rellkelltn87



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Discussion of Abortion, Rewrite, Unplanned Pregnancy, some smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-12-27 18:43:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 37,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21123476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rellkelltn87/pseuds/rellkelltn87
Summary: A missing family is connected to one of SVU’s most horrific cases. Benson is taken aback by an unexpected pregnancy.Canon divergence post-S17. This is a rewrite of a now-orphaned story. It’ll be expanded and S19/S20 references removed.I’ll add some more smut and crying, ok?





	1. Chapter 1

Three weeks after his grandmother died, Rafael Barba put in an application for a judicial appointment. The move was foolish on his part, because it meant that the state senate, which already had an out for him because of how he’d destroyed Alex Muñoz’s political career, would look into his prosecutorial history. In Brooklyn eight years earlier, Barba had given a “loan” to a heroin-addicted witness to ensure she’d appear on the stand. 

His guilt over the witness’s death twelve hours later had chewed away part of his soul, and he still deposited money into an account for her daugter to ensure that the girl and her grandmother had enough to eat and a place to live. 

Eighteen months after he put in for the appointment, Barba appeared before the state senate, where he was told that he would not be approved on account of what they’d learned about the “loan,” the bribe that killed his witness. 

“We put away a guy who raped and murdered two of his cousins after years of terrorizing his family, one of the most gruesome crimes I’ve seen in my career,” he tried to explain. “The defendant terrorized them for years, decades even, before we finally got him.”

The state senate sent their report to the New York State Bar Association. Benson, who’d broken his heart a little bit when she didn’t disclose her relationship with the head of IAB in the middle of a case that very much involved him, offered to accompany him to the hearing. He turned her down. 

For a few days, he was certain that they were going to disbar him. 

He was relieved when they said he could continue practicing law, broken hearted when they said he would no longer be able to apply for judicial appointments. 

Better than a fine, better than contempt, better than disbarment, he had to remind himself. 

But the loss hit him hard, and two months later, he resigned from the Manhattan DA’s office and moved to Miami to work as a paralegal while he studied for the Florida State Bar Exam. He didn’t tell anyone, including Benson, including his mother, that he was leaving. Everyone in his life was rightly furious at him. 

In five years with SVU, he’d lost his closest childhood friend, his grandmother, and his decades-long dream of being _el juez_. 

—

The conference was only 50 miles up the Hutchinson River Parkway, just past New York’s border with Connecticut, but Benson had been slated to speak at 4PM and attend a dinner afterwards, so she’d booked a room to avoid having to naviagate dark winding roads in mid-December. She settled in, showered, dressed, and rehearsed her presentation, unaware that Rafael Barba was in the adjoining room. 

In fact, she was unaware of the arrangement until they found themselves unlocking their doors at ten o’clock at night.

Her heart jumped into her throat when she saw him. Her grief, her brokenness over what had transpired when she’d called Barba’s office one February morning only to learn that he’d resigned and skipped town, had transformed itself into a comfortable balance of fury and apathy. 

“How’s moving on working out for you, Rafael?”

He stumbled, taken aback by either her presence or her abruptness, probably both, and coughed out a “Liv.”

“That’s my name.” She slid her key card into the lock, went into her room, and shut the door firmly behind her. 

If only he’d run to her instead of away, if he’d only been the _a little different from the others_ she’d once believed him to be, she’d have embraced him, held him tight, loved on him until he was ready to face his despair. 

There was a night a few weeks before his heel turn, before his just-another-abrupt-goodbye, when he was at her place working late on a case, when he was sitting at her kitchen counter, in his dress shirt, suit pants, suspenders and socks, agonizing over his next steps in the difficult case he was prosecuting, when she wanted to kiss him. 

She should have kissed him. 

For a year or so before that, she’d occasionally indulge in fantasies about him, knowing she couldn’t act on them until she or Barba, or both, were out of SVU. With Tucker, the conflicts of interest were different; with Barba, hundreds of cases could be re-examined and appealed. 

Two parts of the story Olivia Benson refused to narrate back to herself: one, she’d broken Barba’s heart when she got together with Tucker; and two, she’d fantasized about Barba for something like _five_ years, sometimes even when Tucker was trying his best to get her going in bed. 

She knocked heavily on the door between the two rooms. 

“Liv?” he said. His voice seemed tired.

“Do you want to come in?”

She unlocked the door from her side and heard him do the same.

He was dressed very much like he was the night she’d thought about kissing him.

When he padded into her room in his navy blue and yellow checkered socks that matched the tie he must have shed sometime between when they’d met at the doors to their rooms and this moment, she kicked off her shoes so she wasn’t ten feet taller than him. 

“So, what’ve you been up to?” she asked with a casual calculated apathy.

There was shame in his expression. “Working,” he said. “With the Innocence Collective in Miami. I’m effectively a paralegal until I pass the Florida Bar, but I needed continuing education credits first, so —”

“You came to a conference in Connecticut.”

“It was a chance to visit my mother in the city.”

_But not me?_ she wanted to ask.

“And I saw your name in the program,” he admitted.

“You didn’t come to my talk.”

“I didn’t. I —”

“Chickened out?”

“Yes.” His tongue darted out to lick his lips. “I’m not the same man you knew a year ago. I may have never been that man.”

“Was this a coincidence that we’re staying next to each other?”

“Of course it was.”

“So there’s not even the excuse that you orchestrated this.”

“No,” he said, looking at the wall behind her. 

“So many times — you don’t know what I’ve been through this last year — I thought of you, I couldn’t help thinking of you.” _I needed you_ was on the tip of her tongue, but her brain was wise enough to stop the declaration before it happened. 

Her hands, however, reached for his suspenders. 

He raised his eyebrows.

“I’d thought once you left the DA’s office you and I could get what was between us out of our systems without any cases falling apart,” she told him, a half-truth concealing what had once been an unbroken hope. 

He moved closer. Her hands tightened around his suspenders and he pressed a feather-light kiss to her lips, testing the waters. 

She nodded, so he stepped even closer. Their bodies were almost flush against each other. “Show me,” he said, tilting his head so he could kiss her neck. 

She gasped reflexively when he pulled her harder against him. “You want to —” he started to say, his mouth open, lips still pressed to her skin.

“Get it out of our systems and then go home and forget it ever happened, yes, yes,” she said, and his flinch indicated that he’d expected something else from her. 

_Well,_ she thought smugly, _now you know what it’s like to have your expectations shot to hell, Barba._

Whatever his expectations had been, her frustrations, and least the physical ones she’d gotten used to taking care of on her own, met some relief when Barba unzipped her trousers and rubbed her firmly with his thumb while his lips roamed her neck and collarbone, occasionally meeting her own lips in small, unfortunate sparks. 

“I want to see you,” he said, using his free hand to unbutton her blouse. Kissing the tops of her breasts, he added, “I want to kiss you everywhere. I want you dripping wet for me.” He popped all the _p_s and _t_s on that last sentence, right next to her hear, surely a well-rehearsed move he used to make his partners come, she’d tell herself later. He backed away to roll up his sleeves, his eyes glistening and smirking, then turning to the ground when he caught the anger in hers.

“Come on, Barba.” She pushed her own trousers and underwear lower, to her thighs. “Come on. Show me what you’ve got.”

He teased her with his fingers, pressing her against the wall, slipping one finger, then a second, inside of her, pumping them, his whole upper body moving as he said, “I want to hear you, Liv, baby,” into her jawline.

She could tell that he’d been harboring a lot of fantasies and frustrations himself.

Her orgasm shook her to her core but she only permitted herself a small, strangled groan, withholding from Barba the response he’d begged for.

She dragged him to the bed by his suspenders, stepping out of her pants on the way, and he stopped to kiss her, deep, passionate, almost holy if either of then was willing to allow themselves that possibility. 

Benson certainly wasn’t.

“I —” Barba started to say.

“We’re just here to get it out of our systems,” she reminded him. “If you want more than that, go find somebody else in Miami.”

“Shh,” he said against her lips, “shh. This is whatever you want it to be.”

She sat on the bed and shrugged out of her blouse. He removed her bra and bent to kiss her breasts, hooking his lips to one of them and returning his thumb to her center as she lifted her knees. His temples were dripping with sweat.

_I could have loved you, Rafael Barba_, she thought.

“Hey,” he said breathlessly, “do we need protection?”

“Only if in the last year you —”

“No,” he assured her.

Because of the late-night conversations they’d shared in the year before Barba left, they knew enough about each other’s histories, each other’s sources of heartbreak, to have a clipped discussion about protection. 

“What about —” he started to say.

“I haven’t been able to get pregnant for three years.” 

“I want to hear you,” he said. 

“You want something to remember me by, late at night?” she said, almost sneering, but she hissed out “yes,” when he was inside her, his fingers still rubbing, and she found herself loudly begging him to fuck her, with him obliging until she came again. He followed immediately after, with a grunt and a “god, Liv, sweetheart, sweetheart, Liv.” 

He rested his head on her chest, balancing himself carefully so he remained inside of her for a few more moments. 

“Come on,” she said, groggily tapping his side, “I need the bathroom.”

He rolled off of her, taking a few seconds to assess his state before pulling on his boxers and gathering up his clothes. “Liv,” he called after her. 

She didn’t answer. When she was finished in the bathroom, she walked over to the dresser, digging up a tank top and pajama pants, which she put on while he stood in his underwear, clutching his folded-up clothes. 

“When do you go back to Miami?” she asked.

“This weekend.”

“Thank you for — this — for helping me get it out of my system.”

“You’ll never be out of my system,” he said, a sad, crooked smile spreading across his face. 

“That’s too bad, then.”

“I know what I did. I could write you a whole book of excuses, but they’d be worth less than the paper they were written on.”

She closed the space between them and kissed his sweat-dappled forehead. “Goodbye, Rafa. I loved you. I’d have loved you whether you were a judge or an ADA or a defense attorney or, anything, really, other than a man who left without talking to me.”

“What if we —”

“I loved you. Don’t forget that.”

After that night, they resumed their profound separation. 

The heartbreak tally was Benson 2, Barba 1, but no one was counting.


	2. Chapter 2

The Clyde family looked great on Instagram. Thanks to an alleged inheritance from an aunt who won the lottery and had somehow avoided the curses that befell so many other winners, they owned a townhouse on West 81st Street and a 3-bedroom split-level on the North Fork of Long Island. They travelled a lot, to the point that Dennis and Carly Clyde must have each had at least twelve weeks vacation time, with hotels comping their trips in exchange for favorable reviews and happy hashtags. 

The family’s friends and neighbors gushed over them, but in reality, the Clydes had been on Manhattan SVU’s radar for more than two years.

A nurse alerted NYPD when Carly came into the ER with her third spiral fracture in ten months. All three fractures had clearly been caused by someone forcefully twisting her arm. 

Rollins had interviewed their son Jackson, who was 8 at the time. Jackson said that his brother Billy, Dennis’s son from his first marriage, had broken Carly’s arm all three times. The boy recanted hours later, but Rollins pushed the investigation through anyway. Benson agreed that they had to move forward without a complaining witness on account of Jackson and his two younger siblings.

Benson begged Pippa Cox to do something on the prosecutorial end, but the corporate counsel said that her hands were tied. Abuse cases like the Clydes’ were one in a million, and the law had to protect the one in twenty minors who were physically abused by their parents. Corporate counsel’s responsibility, at least in Pippa’s idealistic view, was to protect minors. 

To Benson, and Barba — who was still SVU’s ADA at the time, more than a year before he abruptly ended his tenure there — this made sense, but they needed a way to protect the younger children nevertheless.

In February 2019, a week before Valentine’s Day, the Clydes disappeared.

All six of them were nowhere to be found. Dennis’s estranged older sister Alana reported them missing.

“They’re on vacation,” a neighbor insisted. “Alana doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s jealous of Dennis.”

“They’re fine,” all their friends said, furious that the police were always on the family’s backs.

Amanda Rollins’s head was pounding as she and Carisi reached hour 16 of their respective shifts — Benson and Fin were on hour 24 already — knowing the Clydes were missing, having no idea where they were, receiving no help from their inner circle or extended families, save for Alana. They were past the crucial 48-hour window. 

Rollins couldn’t get Jackson’s voice out of her head, how his parents had warned him not to tell anybody about how Billy got into fights with Carly. 

The case was likely to go cold, Rollins thought as she opened the door to Benson’s office.

She’d thrown open Benson’s door six or seven times in the last ten hours and thought nothing of the intrusion, at least until she saw her lieutenant’s face. 

“Amanda.” She nearly jumped out of her chair. Her eyes were puffy, cheeks streaked with tears. “Please tell me we’ve got another friend or family member talking, another complaining witness, anything.”

Rollins shut the door behind her. Benson was very clearly hoping that if she didn’t call attention to the near-obvious fact that she’d been crying, Rollins wouldn’t either. “One of my contacts from the Gulf Coast finally got back to me. His people are keeping an eye out.”

“They wouldn’t go there,” Benson said. “We all know that Dennis and his first wife lived in Alabama, and they know we know that. Besides, we still have no idea whether the family’s on the run together, all of them, or —”

“Was worth a shot. Figured he might still have connections, or, since everybody loves the guy so much, an ex-wife willing to help him out.” Then, testing the waters: “Liv?”

“Don’t ask,” she said, sucking a breath in through her nose.

“I won’t.” She went over to Benson’s side of the desk, leaning against the drawers. “What do you need?”

“I need you to find the Clydes so we can protect them from their sixteen-year-old kid.” 

“Working on it.”

“Amanda,” she said, looking up at the detective, her eyes a little puffy, “I’m pregnant.”

That was not what Rollins was expecting to hear. She couldn’t help letting out a “holy —”

“I’ll be 51 if …” Benson trailed off, closing her eyes and shuddering. “This stays between us, all right? And don’t ask your next question, I won’t answer it.”

She empathized, even though when she’d told Benson that she was pregnant with Jessie, her first instinct was to blurt out “it’s not Nick’s.”

“You just found out?” Rollins asked.

Benson nodded. Rollins locked the door, then rushed back to the desk, where she opened her arms to offer Benson a supportive embrace.

“I had no idea,” she whispered into Rollins’s shoulder. “Had a pregnancy scare years ago, and the doctor told me it was unlikely I’d ever retain a pregnancy anyway.”

“I thought you —”

“That was another scare. But that situation was also different because if I’d had a 25-year-old graduate student’s baby when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t be in this job today and I wouldn’t have Noah. This is different. This is very … different.”

“I get it,” Rollins promised.

“I’ve been saying the last year or so that if foster care or one of the adoption agencies called me again, I’d be open to taking in another child. But not this. I didn’t expect this.”

“You really had no idea?”

“No,” Benson insisted. “I’ve been in perimenopause for three years. I couldn’t get pregnant, I wasn’t ovulating most months, I — I’m sorry to dump all of this on you.”

“After all I’ve dumped on you?” Rollins said. “I could never —”

“Not a word of this to any of the guys out there, all right?”

“I got you.”

“Now please go find the Clydes.” As Rollins started to unlock the door, Benson added, “I have no idea what I’m going to do next, so if I don’t bring this up again —”

“I’ll understand. And you’re welcome to “bring it up” with me regardless.”

—

Benson went home and slept during her first break from the impossible Clyde case, only one wave of tears hitting her when she woke up at two in the morning. When she was 17, she’d had a future — the one she’d been fortunate enough in a sense to actually live — ahead of her, and the man on the other side of the embryo was a 25-year-old who thought that sleeping with, and proposing to, his dissertation advisers teenage daughter was a good idea. Then, the decision had been easy. 

_I thought about it, having a kid someday,_ Barba had confessed one evening four years ago when he and Noah were staring each other down over the last cheese cracker, _but, you know how it is._

She didn't have to call him right away. An over-the-counter pregnancy test had turned up positive. She’d been around long enough to understand that didn’t necessarily mean that she was still pregnant. She’d wait for her doctor’s visit in a few days, and then, if she was indeed pregnant, she’d call him.

_I’ll call him_, she promised herself as she pulled the comforter up to her chin and dozed off.

_I loved him_, she remembered.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I rewrite and rethink a couple of things in this story, I'm also breaking it up into more digestible chunks since the original was probably a little confusing.

Rafael Barba was startled by an early morning knock on the door of the one-bedroom apartment he’d been renting in Miami since last March.

Through the peephole, he saw the two-doors-down neighbor he knew only as Talia, a woman about his age who hated the humidity and walls of rain and dreamed of moving north, and worked for a florist. That was all he’d ever gleaned from their front door and mailbox conversations. 

Barba’s apartment was almost entirely boxed up. A little under a year after he’d suddenly taken off, he was heading back to New York City to work for Rita Calhoun’s firm. It was hardly his first choice, but he wanted to get back home, to face down his demons and confront all the hearts he’d broken. 

“Talia,” he said, opening the door, “what’s going on?”

“You’re moving?” she asked, looking around his living room after she’d let herself in. 

“Yes. Are you all right?” Her hands were shaking and her sunken-in eyes told him she hadn’t slept in days.

“I need a lawyer. I need to go to the cops and turn myself in. I need —”

“Stop right there. I am not licensed to practice law in Florida. You cannot disclose to me. I’m going to call one of the best defense attorneys in Miami.”

“I killed my ex-husband,” she said anyway.

“You didn’t tell me that, because there’s no attorney-client privilege between us.”

“Please, _please_, you seem like someone who —”

“You can’t tell me this.” The last thing he needed was to step into another ethically ambiguous hole when he was already on thin ice with the New York Bar Association. A sense of alarm suddenly washed over him. “You don’t have any weapons on you?”

“No, no, of course not,” she said, opening the sweater she’d thrown on over a T-shirt. “Nothing, you see? The problem is —”

“Please let me call an attorney for you. The courts can compel me to repeat everything you’re telling me now.”

“I don’t care.” Talia continued talking as Barba left a carefully-worded message for a defense attorney he’d been working with at the Innocence Collective. “It was self defense, I swear to God, but is it really self defense if —”

“Speak hypothetically,” Barba instructed. “If someone —”

“If someone —”

“Hypothetically —”

“Hypothetically killed someone because they had a hit out on her?”

Barba pursed his lips, folded his arms, and nodded slowly, knowing that the answer to Talia’s hypothetical question was _no_.

To his relief, the attorney called back.

“She’ll pick you up and take you to the police station,” Barba said. “Until then, not a word about what happened.”

“You ever hear of the serial killer William Lewis?”

Barba’s eyes bugged out of his head. He swallowed hard.

“I was one of his victims,” Talia continued.

Barba shuddered.

“Not really, though. I’m going to jail for twenty years, this’ll all come out anyway.”

_Please be mitigating, please be mitigating,_ Barba said to himself.

“One of his victims over in Alabama way back when looked like me. Multiracial woman, around my age and height, and she was never identified. The state police didn’t run DNA back then, the lady didn’t have any dental work, nothing. Dennis worked for the ME’s office, pushing papers, but he was able to shuffle a few records around and say the woman was me.”

Hardly mitigating, this hypothetical story that Barba wasn’t hearing.

“I hate him,” Talia said.

“Please don’t say that. It won’t help your case.”

“He had a hit out on me, I swear on my grandmother’s grave, I swear to God, I swear on everything.” 

Barba rubbed his eyes. “Are you sure it wasn’t a scam? There’s a scam where someone says there’s a hit out on you that they can cancel for a large sum of money.”

“Of course not. I checked. I’m not stupid. Nobody asked me for any money, and besides, the tip-off came from his wife.”

By this point, Barba was sitting on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, his hand in a fist pressed to his forehead. “Maybe you’ll have information that the detectives want, then. But that’s not legal advice. I’m not a lawyer in Florida.” 

“How come you didn’t take the test here? You were talking about it a few months ago, I remember.”

He was mostly relieved that Talia had stopped talking about the murder, but secretly wanted her to continue so he could learn more about the William Lewis connection. “I changed my mind,” he told her. “Decided to go back to New York.”

“Home?”

“Home.”

“Don’t go changing your mind too much, or you’ll end up like Dennis.”

“Talia, please, they can subpoena me —”

“A hundred thousand dollars in debt because Dennis went back to law school three times, never finished. A complete waste, but that’s not how we ended up with all that debt. His mentor, this professor, convinced him to take in a kid he couldn’t afford to take care of. The mentor had taken on William Lewis’s case pro bono. That’s why we were so close to it. There were rumors going around that the kid wasn’t really orphaned. They said he was Lewis’s son and it was all a big scam Dennis fell for somehow.””

A thousand thoughts raced through Barba’s mind: William Lewis’s trials. The records, the pictures, the evidence of how he’d tortured Benson. His escape from prison. Benson facing down IAB. Her struggle to move forward.

“So Dennis and I were already divorced, but he talked me into faking my death, my murder at Lewis’s hands, so he could collect insurance and lawsuit money on me. I can’t believe it worked. Asshole used the money to put a down payment on a house with his new wife, never got the kid he adopted any of the help he said he’d get him. They were telling people they’d won the lottery or something. The one time I talked to Dennis afterwards, asked him what was going on with the kid, he said, “oh no, don’t worry, it’s all taken care of,” and laughed like it was funny.”

“You got away with faking your own death?” Barba couldn’t help asking.

“Dumb luck,” Talia said. “Dumb fucking luck. Dennis always had it. Look at him now, an Instagram celebrity with two houses.”

“Again, this is not legal advice, but you probably don’t want to convey jealousy of their social media success when you talk to the police.”

“Right,” she said, just as Barba’s colleague texted to say that she was waiting outside.

“She’s here. She’ll talk to you and then she’ll go with you to the central police station.”

“Thank you, Rafael. A lot of other people would have called 911 on me right away. You’re a good man.”

“That’s questionable,” he said, a sad smirk forming at the corner of his mouth. 

He walked Talia out, and returned to his apartment to continue packing.

He needed to go home. 

Home could have been Olivia Benson. Home might have been something he built with her. 

But that night in Connecticut, she’d made it clear where they stood, and she was right. He’d deserted her when they needed each other most.

_I loved you_, he remembered her saying. _I’d have loved you whether you were a judge or an ADA or a defense attorney or, anything, really, other than a man who left without talking to me._

Sometimes he’d remember the feel of her, how she’d looped her fingers around his suspenders and pulled him towards the bed, how her breasts dragged themselves across his chest, the way she groaned when his hands found the right places on her scarred but hallowed skin, the way she’d whispered, “fuck me, Rafa, I need it, fuck me,” and thrusted her hips up toward him.

That memory was enough to get him off in the shower on a good day, but it was also too much: he always felt a terrible hollowness in his belly afterwards, the fantasy a reminder that he’d lost her, that he’d destroyed everything they should have had.

He fell asleep after midnight and woke up abruptly at 2AM following a dream that it was 2013 again and Liv was missing, and NYPD was convinced that Lewis had murdered her. His brain took too long to tell his body that it was only a dream, and so when he found himself still awake at 3, he got out of bed, opened his laptop, and composed an email.

_Dear Liv,_

_I miss you._

_We were the fiercest commanding officer-prosecutor team that Manhattan SVU had ever seen. I loved you then. I miss sharing our secrets over scotch and Cabernet. I loved you then, too._

_I loved you when I appeared before the Bar. I loved you when they told me I’d never be a judge._

_Some people are able to move on from a series of terrible decisions and say, “I regret nothing,” but I regret everything because you and I are no longer a team._

_Next week, I’m starting a new job in New York, working for Rita’s firm. “Defense attorney” is miles and miles from “el juez,” but I need to come home. _

_I miss you. I miss my friend._

_Yours (always),  
Rafa_

He hit send and hoped she’d respond, which would be a minor miracle, if there ever was such a thing.


	4. Chapter 4

“This is a fucking mess,” Benson heard Carisi say with an uncharacteristic hoarseness when she walked into the squadroom at 7:30 the next morning.

Carisi was standing next to his desk with Captain Ray Kozlov, an NYPD veteran who’d recently been promoted to head up the homicide division. Kozlov was a big name. The only big name who usually showed up at the precinct was Deputy Chief Dodds. Something was wrong.

“Why?” Benson asked.

“Dennis Clyde was shot in his car in broad daylight a couple days ago,” Carisi told her. “No sign of Carly or the kids.”

“I got a call a few hours ago that Dennis’s ex-wife confessed to his murder,” Kozlov said. “I’m here to tell you homicide’s taking over, and we may have to pass this on to the feds.”

“We’ve been on this family for two years, Captain.”

“Can I talk to you in private, Lieutenant?”

Benson led Kozlov to her office. When the door was closed, he continued: “Dennis’s ex-wife was living under an assumed identity because, as part of an insurance scam, she pretended to be one of William Lewis’s victims down in Alabama.”

“William Lewis,” Benson said, the name coming out as little more than a gasp of air. “That’s why you want us off the case?”

“Dennis was working for the ME’s office at the time, when everybody’s minds were on those murders and how Lewis had gotten away with the first two. What I’m hearing is that they faked her death for insurance money and switched her up with a Jane Doe. You can’t work this case because of your obvious connection to Lewis.” 

“Lewis is dead,” Benson said, her voice steadier now.

“But he’s the connection between you and the Clydes.” 

“I understand that, Captain, but we have been on the Clydes for two years. Their son told us that his older brother broke his mother’s arm three times. The younger children are not safe in that home as long as Dennis refuses to seek treatment for his violent oldest child.”

“Sonny’s told me all this,” Kozlov said. “My hands are tied.”

“I’ll talk to Dodds, then.”

“Go ahead. You can pit me against him. Do what you need to do, but my hands are tied, and we are taking this case from your department.”

_Sonny’s told me all this._ Rollins had slipped up a week or two ago, letting on that Carisi had been secretly seeing someone, and that his boyfriend-of-sorts was a higher-up in the department. She’d sworn Benson to secrecy and looked like she was ready to kick herself over the slip-up. 

If _Sonny’s told me all this_ was a similar slip-up on Kozlov’s part, then she could leverage that accidental knowledge to stay on the Clyde’s case. Of course, she would never do that to Carisi, not in a thousand years. There had to be another way.

“What about Alana Clyde, the sister?” Benson asked. “I want a detail on her. She’s my only complaining witness regarding Carly’s injuries.”

“We can’t afford a detail on your complaining witness. I told you, go ahead and pit Dodds against me, see if he bites. I doubt he will. As for Dennis Clyde’s murder, that’s obviously out of both of our jurisdictions.”

“But relevant to finding his family,” Benson insisted.

“Which is no longer your department’s concern. The feds expect us to kick the entire case over in 24 hours or they’ll take it off our hands themselves.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Kozlov said his goodbyes to the squad and headed out to 1PP. “Detective Carisi, my office,” Benson said, prompting him to follow her.

When Carisi shut the door behind him, Benson started in. “We’ve been on the Clydes for two years. If we get Billy for breaking his mother’s arm, if we get a court order that he can’t live with his younger siblings, I don’t want anyone screwing this up.”

“Lieu, with all due respect, Dennis was found in Florida. You should kick this over to the feds.”

“And have them do nothing about Billy Clyde breaking his mother’s arm three times and pushing his brother down a flight of stairs?”

“We don’t know for sure that he pushed Jackson down the stairs.”

“The nurses do. The nurses knew exactly what they were looking at them. And we have Pippa Cox and social workers. We have resources the feds don’t. Jackson and his younger siblings need to be safe.”

Carisi flopped onto the couch beneath the window, staring at nothing for a few seconds.

“Well?” Benson said.

“You want me to say you’re right, you’re right. We can protect the kids in this jurisdiction a whole lot better if we work with Ms. Cox.”

“Good, then don’t screw up Pippa’s case if we make one for her. Whatever your situation is, Kozlov’s the head of the homicide division. You need to break it off or disclose.”

The nagging pain in her back and nausea in her throat were surely affecting her mood, and at the back of her mind she knew she was very, very wrong to confront Carisi, but she’d made a similar mistake with David Haden, and had nearly made it a second time with Tucker.

“What’re you talking about?”

Now she felt a pinch of guilt. She’d only known that Carisi was seeing a departmental higher-up because of Rollins’s slip, and she’d promised Rollins that she wouldn’t clue Carisi in. Maybe his high-ranking paramour wasn’t Kozlov at all, but Benson’s detective gut told her otherwise. “You remember,” she said, trying to temper her voice with a hint of gentleness, “the St. Fabiola’s case. You remember how it almost went down the toilet because Tucker and I waited so long to disclose.”

“I remember we got those guys, brought ‘em all down, regardless of Tucker.”

“Barba almost —”

“Only problem with you not disclosing was that you broke Barba’s heart.”

She sat behind her desk, somewhat taken aback by Carisi’s directness on a matter she wasn’t aware he’d known anything about. 

But in light of what she’d said to him, she deserved that directness.

“I’ve been on this case a while, not much sleep,” Carisi said, shaking his head and scratching the back of his neck. “Was real shaken up about what happened with Dennis, and the ex-wife still being alive and all. Are you all right, with what they said happened —”

“The William Lewis connection is bizarre, to say the least.” She looked up at Carisi, and as the fog of hormones and trauma lifted, she recognized that there was a lot that her demand for disclosure hadn’t taken into account. “I’m sorry, Carisi. I won’t bring it up again. I am genuinely sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, half-mumbling.

“We have to find those kids, and if Carly hires an attorney to protect Billy —”

“You really think that’d happen?”

“It’s not unheard of. It’s a one in a million situation, but it happens. Pippa and I, we’ve both seen it in a few different contexts, just because of where we happen to work. And with any case even remotely related to William Lewis, we don’t want to risk a judge tossing the charges out the window.”

“The guy put a curse on the entire legal system, I heard. Everything he touched turned to mistrial.”

“Tell me about it,” Benson said, suppressing an impulse to shudder. 

William Lewis haunted the justice system. William Lewis haunted her.

“But,” Carisi said, “we’ve got a possible outcry witness in Dennis’s sister. And we’ve got Jackson, I hope to God we’ve got Jackson.”

“I do too. Go find him.”

“I will. And I’ll tread carefully.”

“I know.”

“Lieu, I —”

“I know.” 

“Thanks,” he said, heading back out to the squadroom.

Benson opened her laptop, put on her reading glasses, and scanned her email. Rollins had forwarded her screenshots from social media reflecting the outpouring of support for Dennis. Some Instagram followers were speculating about where Carly and the four kids were, while others warned them not to speculate.

She switched the tab to her personal email, where she found six “LAST CHANCE SALE!” subject lines from the same children’s clothing store and a note from Barba, whose subject line was “For Liv.”

She opened the email, unable to help laying a hand across her heart as she read.

_I miss you too, Rafa_, was at the tip of her tongue, on her fingertips, but she’d reached the upper limit on how much disappointment she could handle in one half-century. 

—

At the OB/GYN that afternoon, she had an ultrasound and learned that she was indeed nine weeks pregnant, which, the doctor had to explain, meant that one of her eggs had been fertilized seven weeks ago. 

Of course it was seven weeks ago. Before that, she hadn’t had sex in two years.

The extra two weeks was added because doctors measure the length of a pregnancy from the date of the last menstrual period. She hadn’t had a period in more than six months. 

“How unusual is this?” Benson asked.

Dr. Melody Haor, Benson’s endlessly patient gynecologist, closed her eyes, then quickly opened them again. “For most of the population, very unusual,” was her answer. 

“But for me —”

“It does happen.”

“Give me a week to talk to the” — oh, she couldn’t say _that_ word, such a loaded term in both her and Barba’s histories — “my friend, and we’ll discuss our next steps.”

Dr. Haor nodded. “Do you want a prescription for prenatal vitamins?” 

“Sure.” 

She appreciated that Dr. Haor had phrased the question as a question, but still found herself disoriented as she walked back to the subway. 

Before she headed underground, she sent a text message to Barba: _Call me as soon as you’re back in New York._


	5. Chapter 5

She invited him over on Friday night, his first day back in New York, after Noah had gone to bed. She wasn’t about to abruptly reintroduce him to Noah’s life when he’d so abruptly left it late last winter. 

Barba removed his long tan coat and hung it on a hook behind Benson’s door, as if he was still intimately familiar with the place.

His black polo and dark jeans rendered him paler than usual. 

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Rafa,” she said when they were standing together in the living room. “It’s surreal.”

“Oh,” he said, his face aching with sympathy, “you’re looking for the Clyde children, so you must have heard —”

“Excuse me?”

_You’re looking for the Clyde children_ was the last thing she’d expected to come out of his mouth when she tried to tell him that she was pregnant. 

“I can’t go into why, because I’d like to protect a defendant as much as I can, but I know about the William Lewis rumors.”

“Those aren’t rumors. The ex-wife definitely faked her death by switching places with an actual victim. That’s why the feds are so eager to take the case away from us.”

Barba’s eyes widened. He’d clearly made a mistake.

“What, Rafa?” she demanded. “What else do you know?”

“You won’t be able to use what I tell you in your investigation, and it’s not important, just unfounded rumors, so there’s no point in my sharing any of it with you.”

“Stop backtracking.” 

He shut his eyes for a second. “Liv,” he said, hesitantly taking a step closer, “there were rumors going around that Dennis Clyde’s law school advisor back in Alabama, who was representing Lewis, tricked Dennis into adopting Lewis’s son.”

“Billy,” she said, the name coming out as a whisper. 

“The stories I’ve heard so far range from “the professor wanted to make sure that the child was taken care of” to “the only smart decision Dennis ever made was cutting Lewis off, and this was calculated revenge on Lewis’s and the lawyer’s part.” But Liv,” he said, clapping his hands together, “we don’t know if there’s any truth at all to the rumors.”

“You’re telling me Billy Clyde might be —” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She swallowed the lump in her throat and suppressed a wave of nausea coming up from her core.

“Unfounded rumors,” Barba said quickly, “probably meant to mock Dennis. I should never have brought it up. I’m sorry.”

Benson ran to the bathroom without answering him, shut the door, and vomited into the toilet. Barba was outside. “Liv, are you all right?” he asked.

Tears were running down her face from the sudden episode of what was either “morning” sickness or traumatic recall. “Liv, sweetheart,” she heard him say, and he must not have been keeping track of his words at all if he was already reaching for a term of endearment, “I should have kept my big mouth shut. What can I do to help?”

“Go home,” she said hoarsely. 

There was no point in further discussion. She was off the case because Dennis Clyde was connected to William Lewis, and Carisi was right, everything William Lewis touched turned to mistrial. Everything William Lewis touched: her hands trembled as she considered the implications, all the implications, of the possibility that Billy Clyde, the teenager who’d broken his stepmother’s arm three times, who’d allegedly pushed his younger brother down a flight of stairs, was Lewis’s biological son.

“Uncle Rafa?” She heard Noah’s voice outside the bathroom. “What are you doing in our house?”

“I came to see you, but Mom said you were already in bed.” Barba’s years of courtroom experience had taught him to think on his feet. “I got back to New York, and the first thing I said to myself was, I have to apologize to my friend Noah for leaving without saying goodbye.”

“Mom was mad at you,” Noah said. “You made her sad. You have to say you’re sorry to her too.”

“It’s okay, Noah,” Benson said, cautiously opening the bathroom door. “Let us be the grownups.”

“Did you throw up?” 

“Yes.” 

“Did Uncle Rafa make you so sad that you threw up?”

_Lay it on thick, kid,_ she wanted to say.

“How about Uncle Rafa reads you one story while I wash up, and then you go back to sleep?”

Barba and Noah both agreed to the arrangement. She took a shower, put on a T-shirt and pajama pants, opened the bedroom window in spite of the chill, did some of the breathing exercises that Dr. Lindstrom had taught her, and closed the window again.

Barba knocked lightly on the door.

“Come in,” she said.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Barba told her. His eyes were red. “It’s a rumor. William Lewis didn’t have a son. I looked into every part of that asshole’s life. I was not going to let him see the light of day again.”

She sat at the edge of the bed.

“Hey,” he said, approaching her, his fingers carefully grazing her arm, “it’s over. I promise, it’s over. He’s long gone.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

“What’d you want to talk to me about?”

She patted the spot next to her. He sat with her on top of the comforter.

She tried a few times to get the words to come to her lips, but the words weren’t there. With this new piece of information — dear god, had Billy Clyde been named after William Lewis? — she couldn’t be sure whether it was wise to bring a child into a world that still had remnants of Lewis in it. “Not tonight,” she said. “I can’t do this now.”

“I understand,” Barba assured her. He must have thought that she wanted to talk about their relationship, about what had happened in Connecticut a week before Christmas. “I don’t know what to tell you, except that I don’t believe the rumors that Billy is Lewis’s son.”

“He broke Carly’s arm three times.”

“You and I should know better than anyone —” He cut himself off, his voice breaking.

“We do.” She reached for his hand and found that he was already reaching for hers. “We do,” she said again, her voice choked with tears this time. 

“Genes are not destiny, and that kid’s violent tendencies, whatever they may be, have nothing to do with Lewis, and they certainly don’t mean that a horrendous rumor about a horrendous person is true.”

“Right.” 

“You want to talk?”

“I have too many thoughts racing through my mind right now to have the reasonable discussion I wanted to have tonight, so I’m going to sleep on it and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

They both stood, and he moved to embrace her. She let him hold her for a minute while tears leaked from her eyes; she hated to let anyone see her cry, but she felt in the moment that she could trust Barba, who she hadn’t trusted in a very long time. 

She hadn’t trusted him since he walked away, just like (almost) everyone else.

“That’s a good idea, talking tomorrow,” he said.

She could feel his shoulders shaking, and she wondered if he was crying, or struggling not to. 

“I walked away because I thought I’d lost everything, and I couldn’t face losing everything. But I lost you, which meant that I’d lost everything, and you, which was —”

“I know,” Benson said, pulling back. The soft vulnerability in the slope of his eyes reminded her of the worry written on his face after he came home from his humiliating confrontation with the state senate. “You could have talked to me. You should have told me how you felt, we’d have talked, instead of — instead of what you did.”

He hugged her again. “Going forward, I’ll always talk to you.”


	6. Chapter 6

Benson was awakened from a deep sleep, the soundest she’d slept in more than a decade, by her cell phone buzzing against her bedside table. With her back aching and her muscles pulling in a thousand different directions, she reached for the phone, briefly returning it to its original location when she saw Carisi’s name on the screen. 

For a moment, she was alarmed by the pain made worse by stretching, the sensation that her muscles had stretched beyond their limit. But as she walked to the bathroom, the aches in her arms, legs, and back lessened a bit. In the bathroom, she was able to reassure herself that everything about her body was exactly the same as it had been the day before.

The brief minutes of panic made her wonder if her heart was telling her brain to move forward with the pregnancy, or vice versa.

But, if Dennis Clyde’s eldest son’s biological father was indeed William Lewis, then her brain and her heart knew better, didn’t they?

Or, was it even more foolish for her to believe that her decisions ought to be rooted in whether or not there were any remnants of Lewis left in the world?

She needed to talk to Dr. Lindstrom.

She needed to talk to Barba.

But, more pressing at the moment, she needed to talk to Carisi.

“Happy Saturday, Lieutenant,” Carisi said when she called him back. “Alana Clyde is coming down to the precinct at 10. We’ve got three hours to talk to her before the case is officially handed over to the feds.”

“How’d you — Carisi, you said yourself that everything Lewis touches turns to mistrial. We need to be careful, all of us.”

“And like you said, we need to find those kids. We have resources the feds don’t. Your words. Right now, I’m making sure those kids get found.”

“Let me ask my neighbor to watch Noah. I’ll see you at 10.”

—

“Amanda,” Carisi said, surprised when Rollins showed up in the squadroom at 9, “you weren’t called in.”

“Fin and I flipped for it. You’re cuddling with the homicide chief and Liv survived being tortured by Lewis. We’re not letting all our efforts with the Clydes go to shit on account of that.”

Carisi clasped his hands behind his back. “So you not only told the lieutenant about me and Ray, you told the sarge too?” 

“I didn’t tell Fin.”

“And —“

“I said something to Liv by accident.”

“Something I told you in confidence.”

“You know it won’t go past Liv. And besides, this case involves William Lewis. I hope Kozlov’s explained to you exactly what that means.”

“I know what it means. Witnesses afraid to testify. Mistrials.”

“That’s why I’m here to to take Alana’s statement.”

“Lemme ask you something,” Carisi said, following Rollins as she headed towards the break room. “You told the lieutenant my personal business, so fair is fair. I get one personal question.”

“You’re hovering,” she warned.

“You’re the one who told the lieutenant about me and Ray, so —”

“Maybe,” Rollins said, tilting her head and folding her arms, “we’re all better off not gossiping.”

Carisi leaned against the wall. “We’ve talked about disclosing.”

“Good.”

“There’s things people don’t understand, like, how can you work for SVU, for the great enlightened Olivia Benson, and still be so goddamn closeted, but —”

“It’s okay, Sonny. I’m sorry. I overstepped by miles when I told Liv.”

“I’ve got a whole lot of advantages, a whole lot of privileges as the kids say, but —”

“Your dad?”

“My mom. And Gina.”

“Gina’s on her, what, sixth fiancé these days?”

“Seventh. But he’s the first one after her marriage broke up, so she’s only counting him as number two.”

“Seems fair,” Rollins said with a hint of a laugh. “What’d you want to ask me?”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s ridiculous anyway.”

Rollins was intrigued. “Come on, just between us.”

“Yeah, lot of success you’ve had with keeping things just between us lately.” He pressed a hand to the vending machine. “Lieu’s been acting weird lately.”

He pronounced _weird_ with at least three syllables, maybe four.

“You think so?”

“Go ahead and throw your coffee in my face if you need to, but is the lieutenant pregnant?”

“What?”

“I have a kind of radar for pregnancy.”

“I remember. You knew I was pregnant with Jesse before I. Did.”

“So —”

“So Liv is 50 years old and hasn’t been in a relationship in two years. What do you think?”

“I still think she might be pregnant.”

Rollins let out a long breath through a small space between her pursed lips. “Listen, Sonny, I’m sorry I slipped up to Liv, I should have been more careful. I owe you at least ten covered shifts. It was an accident but an asshole move on my part, especially considering that you deserve to enjoy yourself a little while longer without having to be grilled by Gina. But you weren’t here when Liv was kidnapped, when she was tortured by Lewis. Your research, your law school classes, that’s not going to tell you the whole story. We should kick the case over to the feds before the courts we work with find themselves powerless to help the rest of the Clydes.”

“Our corporate counsel can —”

“Lewis is dead but not for Liv. In this department, we shouldn’t be dealing with anybody who was connected to him.”

“Let’s piece together what happened so we can at least find the three younger children. Finding them, that’s still our jurisdiction, that’s still our job.”

“You really want to fight the feds on jurisdiction over the three kids?”

“Fight ‘em on jurisdiction,” Carisi said, feigning exasperation. “What do I look like, a lawyer?”

Rollins smirked and patted Carisi’s arm. “That’s always an option for you,” she said. “I remember after Dodds was killed, Barba was talking to you about a job with the Brooklyn DA.”

“Barba,” Carisi said, rolling his eyes. “Fuck Barba.”

“Ouch.”

“After the way he left? That was no way to leave. We find out, what, five days later he’s taken off to Miami, didn’t say goodbye to any of us, even Benson? I don’t know what the hell was wrong with him.” 

With that, an exhausted-looking Benson opened the break room door. Her eyes were drooping, her skin sallow, her hand shaking just a bit as it clutched a medium coffee. “Rollins,” she said, “who called you in on a Saturday?”

“Fin and I —”

“So there’s someone around who can’t be thrown off the witness stand. I get it.” Benson sat with Rollins and Carisi. “We all need to keep in mind that Dennis’s murder, the hit he allegedly had out on his ex-wife, their conspiracy to fake her death, all of that belongs to the feds, and the investigation into the rest of the family’s disappearance goes over to them tonight, officially.”

“Did you talk to Pippa Cox?” Carisi asked.

“I’m going to get another coffee from the good cart before Alana comes in,” Rollins said. “Anybody need anything?”

“I’ve got mine,” Benson said, raising her cup. 

Rollins patted her on the shoulder and left her alone with Carisi.

Benson briefly winced, and Carisi jumped up towards the soda machine.

“Lemme get you a ginger ale, Lieu.”

“At nine-thirty in the morning?”

“You look like you’ve got agita.”

“I’m fine.”

“Like, meatball-hero-level agita.”

“What were you and Rollins talking about?” Now she seemed more angry than exasperated.

“I asked Rollins a question that I swear to God she didn’t answer.”

“Let’s not speculate on each other’s personal lives. Deal?”

“Deal,” Carisi said.

—

Alana Clyde came in with her attorney just after 10, and Benson sat them all — including Rollins and Carisi — in her office, figuring they’d be more comfortable there than in an interview room. “I’m only here to make sure you don't’ decide to go after Ms. Clyde if all your leads run dry,” the attorney said.

“Alana, the only part of the case we’re concerned with right now is finding the kids,” Benson said. “Tell us what you know.”

“You know the story about Billy, right?”

“Why don’t you tell us,” Rollins suggested.

“Dennis’s law professor the first time — or maybe the second time — he went to law school convinced him to take Billy in. Dennis and I were still on speaking terms then. I told him not to, or at least not to do it without an attorney doing a background check, or getting a social worker involved. Something about the whole situation, how they didn’t want to go through normal channels, didn’t sit right with me. Everybody else thought he was doing a good thing, though, so I told myself that whatever didn’t sit right with me was my own stupid worried mind.”

“We know about the rumors,” Rollins said. “All of them.”

“And, I mean, those rumors are probably just that, rumors. But Dennis was exactly the kind of guy who’d have gotten involved with those kinds of people, who’d have thought they were his friends, who’d have trusted them. I told the other detectives, the federal guys, I don’t believe for a second that Dennis had a hit out on Teresa, but —”

“Teresa?” Benson asked.

“His ex-wife. She goes by Talia now, I heard. I assume you know by now the whole story about how they faked her death to get money to get Billy the help he needs, and Dennis used the money to buy a new house with Carly. But, Teresa, she was always a lot smarter than Dennis. I believe somebody Dennis crossed paths with, somebody he trusted, might have put that hit out on Teresa to keep her quiet. Dennis trusted a lot of people.”

“We need any ideas you’ve got on where those kids might be,” Rollins said. “Help us.”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Carly’s sort of a grifter, but she wouldn’t hurt a fly. She was in on this “influencer” kick twelve years ago, at the ground floor. Affiliate links, she called it. I think that in Dennis she saw the chance to blog and ‘Gram a wedding and a few births. I don’t know if she admits that to herself.” 

“We checked their townhouse here and their house on Long Island,” Benson said, “and a couple of timeshares.”

“They might have had more timeshares,” Alana suggested. “Dennis made up a whole story about an inheritance from our aunt, but we never had an aunt who won the lottery. I’d always assumed their money was all part of Carly’s grift until I found out just the other day that Teresa wasn’t dead. Most of the vacations were from the social media people, but the real estate, a lot of it, was from the insurance and lawsuit money Dennis made off of Teresa’s death. And on top of all that, nobody has a clue what Carly has to deal with on account of Dennis’s idiocy.”

“We have some idea,” Benson said.

“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help. I cut him off years ago, couldn’t watch this unfold anymore, couldn’t watch him get involved with the wrong people despite a million warnings from me.”

“Do you know the name of the law professor, the one who asked Dennis to take in Billy?”

“Cambridge, I think, like the university. John Cambridge. It’s horrible, you know. My best friend back home adopted her kids when they were older, like 4 or 5, and what happened with Dennis and his son gives all the good my friend has done — all the good her kids have done — a bad rap.”

“Believe me, I understand,” Benson assured her. 

When Alana and her attorney left, Benson turned to Rollins and Carisi. “We’ve got less than 48 hours to find all the timeshares they owned, if there’s any we missed. As soon as Monday comes around, the feds will be awake and ready to send us cease and desists.”

“I’ll comb through their social media accounts again,” Rollins said. “You can go home if you need to.”

“I’ll help for a few hours.”

Carisi returned to the squadroom. Rollins folded her arms and eyed Benson suspiciously. “You can go home,” she said. “We’ve got this.”

“I’ll stay a few hours. I’m your commanding officer. Don’t tell me to go home.”

“If I may be so bold, _commanding officer_, do you really need me to be here or are you avoiding talking to the father?”

Benson rolled her eyes. “I hope you didn’t tell Carisi about my private life.”

“I didn’t, I swear. That idiot can smell pregnancy or something. An egg gets fertilized within a five-mile radius of Carisi, next thing you know he’s standing there with a can of ginger ale.”

“Okay. Thanks. Let’s get to work.”

—-

She was planning to talk to Barba that night, she really was. 

At two in the afternoon, a somber-looking Ray Kozlov came into the squadroom. Benson, who was working with Rollins on the other end of the room, saw him approach Carisi and say something under his breath, near Carisi’s ear. Carisi shuddered. Kozlov touched his arm, reticently at first, then more firmly. “Let me break it to them,” Carisi said, and Kozlov nodded.

“They need me back on the scene,” Kozlov said. “It’s our jurisdiction again for now, I suppose.”

“Yeah.” Carisi reached out and quickly squeezed Kozlov’s hand. “You all right?”

Benson’s heart sank as she guessed what they must have been talking about.

“All my thirty years on the job, never seen a crime scene like this one,” the homicide captain said.

Carisi laid an open hand on his back. “I’ve seen it once before. You don’t get something like that out of your head.”

They walked out together. Carisi returned a few minutes later.

“Lieu, Amanda, let’s talk,” he said, tilting his head in the direction of Benson’s office. 

Once they were inside, Carisi told them about the scene that Kozlov had been called to: all three younger Clyde children, shot to death in the Upper West Side townhouse they’d disappeared from. Carly Clyde had already confessed to the murders. NYPD knew her confession was full of shit, but they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest her 17-year-old son Billy. Homicide and CSI were scouring Manhattan and its surrounding rivers for the weapon.

Benson registered the horrific murders as a massive failure on SVU’s part. Billy had been threatening to murder his family for at least the two years that SVU had the Clydes in their sights. 

Carisi’s face was scrunched up and he had tears in his eyes. Rollins pressed her palm to her forehead, her own eyes wide and unblinking. 

“I’ll call Pippa,” Benson said.

“You’d think,” Carisi said, gritting his teeth, a fury in his demeanor that Benson had rarely been privy to, “that at least one other fucking person other than the sister would have come forward with their suspicions, with their doubts, over ten, twelve, fourteen years. Nobody else was suspicious that they weren’t an Insta-perfect family? Nobody?”

“Sometimes, you don’t really know a person, even if you think you _know_ them,” Rollins said. “You ever watch those stories on Dateline about people who murder their spouses? The friends always say they were a perfect couple.”

“And if anyone understands that, it’s Pippa,” Benson said as she lifted her receiver to call the corporate counsel. 

She had planned to tell Barba about the pregnancy that night, but instead wound up in an emergency meeting with Pippa Cox, Ray Kozlov, and the detectives who’d been first on the scene, until 7:30 that evening. She got home at 8:30, hugged Noah tight, would not let him go for a long while, and let him stay up late until he fell asleep on the couch.

At 10, after she finally got Noah to bed, still not wanting to let go of him for a second, she called Barba. 

She wasn’t ready to tell him yet. 

But she tried to gather up courage because she was considering continuing with the pregnancy, and knew she had a responsibility to tell him, especially if he was back in New York for good.

He replied to her first tearful “listen, Rafa” with “It’s all right if you’re not ready to talk yet,” his own voice unusually rough and gravelly.

He still thought they were going to talk about Connecticut on its own terms, she was certain.

“All the warnings were there,” Benson said, “but no charges were pressed, no complaints were made. The little boy, Jackson, he _told us_ two years ago and we couldn’t do anything because he recanted. We couldn’t do anything because someone made him recant. The law could do nothing for those kids.”

“Sometimes the law hedges its bets in the wrong direction, but necessarily.”

“None of what happened today was _necessary_.

“Do you want me to come over?” he asked.

“What year do you think it is?” she snapped, and she knew he didn’t entirely deserve her anger, but still, he’d _left_, he’d resigned and walked away without telling her, his alleged best friend, about his plans. “You think it’s two years ago, that you can come over and talk and make it all better? You can’t just come back from what you did, Rafa. Good night.”

“Wait, Liv,” he said before she could end the call. “I love you.”

“I’m too furious — not just at you, but at a lot of things — to respond to that tonight.”


	7. Chapter 7

Barba called her on Monday afternoon to ask if they could talk. She wasn’t in a better mood, but knew it was important that she tell him about the improbable pregnancy. 

He showed up at her place just before Noah’s bedtime. When Benson let him in, Noah hurried to the door to greet him, and he knelt down and hugged the boy. “I told you I’d come see you and Mom again, didn’t I?” he said, looking up at Benson with hints of guilt and mischief twinkling in his eyes.

“What’s going on?” she asked after she’d put Noah to bed.

Barba licked his lower lip. “We have to work out what’s between us.”

“I know.”

“We have to work it out now.”

“Right now?”

“Yes, because I’ve been asked to represent Carly Clyde.”

Benson must have blinked a few hundred times before she said, “What?”

“She called our firm seeking representation.”

“On your first day at work?”

“They want me on the case because of my experience with SVU. That experience was why they were willing to hire me as an upper-level associate.”

“And what do Carly and your bosses expect you to do?”

“She’s being arraigned in the morning. They want me to get her released on bail, and then they want me to minimize her sentence.”

Anger bubbled up inside Benson. “She’s covering for her stepson. I don’t know why, maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, maybe Dennis abused her too, but she’s covering for Billy.”

“We all —”

“Three children were murdered today.”

“If she insists on going all the way with her guilty plea, we’re sworn to —”

“Three children were murdered. Get out of my apartment.”

Barba’s mouth fell open. “I came here to ask you — to talk to you — about whether we were going to continue to pursue what we — Liv.” He reached for her; she stood to avoid him. 

“How dare you even _think_ about representing Carly.”

“Without a good attorney, she’ll go to prison for life.”

“You are protecting William Lewis’s son,” she said, spitting the accusation out one word at a time.

“That’s an unfounded rumor, and you know it.”

“That’s your argument, really? Kid threatens his family for years, breaks Carly’s arm, Dennis uses the money that was supposed to help him for a down payment on a goddamn mansion, nobody reaches out, nobody gives a shit as long as everything looks good on Instagram, and then he kills _three innocent children_ and your argument is that he’s not really William Lewis’s son? Does it matter?”

Barba shut his eyes tight. “I wasn’t going to accept the case if you wanted to pursue a romantic relationship, because then there would be a conflict of interest.”

“Ha.”

Barba headed for the door, grabbing his coat on the way. “I’ll leave you alone. I’ve clearly fucked up again, for the millionth time. I’m sorry, Liv.”

“Shove your I’m sorrys. You think you’re the patron saint of law, don’t you, making the decisions that don’t — just go home, Rafa, before I say anything I regret, go home, please.”

“I’ll turn down the case if it means —”

“_If it means._ That you’d consider it in the first place breaks my heart, just like the decision you made last year breaks my heart.”

“Liv.” His face started to crumple as he walked through the doorway. “I should have said no as soon as they asked me. I should have seen that it was a conflict of interest regardless of our relationship.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Whoever Billy Clyde really was, whatever circumstances had brought him to Dennis, in that moment, all Benson could see was Barba seriously considering protecting the woman who was protecting William Lewis’s son, and to her, that meant he was choosing William Lewis — the piece of him allegedly still in the world — over her and the pregnancy he knew nothing about.

—

“You are an asshole.”

Rita Calhoun’s voice echoed off the three-and-a-half walls of Barba’s claustrophobic office, with a “window” that looked out onto the cubicles of frazzled assistants putting in 60-hour work weeks, not all that different from the office he’d occupied during his first five years with the Brooklyn DA. 

“That’s a common refrain these days,” Barba said with a smirk. 

“You were going to take the Carly Clyde case?”

“I’m new here. I had to at least consider it. And besides, she’s entitled to representation.”

“I was offered the case, and I turned it down on account of _my_ association with Olivia Benson and the Lewis kidnapping. What’s wrong with you?”

He swallowed hard. “When I considered taking the case, I didn’t consider the implications of taking the case.”

“You are an asshole,” she repeated, folding her arms, actual anger behind her eyes.

“I thought because the Lewis connection was unlikely —”

“You talked to the ex-wife. She and Dennis knew Lewis. They faked her death by switching her identity with one of Lewis’s victims. Forget the stupid rumor about the kid, there was a Lewis connection no matter what, and that should have meant an immediate “no” on your part. How’s Olivia?”

“Furious,” he said.

“She’s entitled to fury.”

“I know.”

“Here’s what you’re going to do next: one, you’re starting therapy.”

“Already done. I’ve got someone here recommended by the psychotherapist I saw in Miami. What happened last year threw off my decision-making skills, I’ve been told. Any other HIPAA violations I can offer you, Counselor?”

“From there, you’ll —”

“What am I, a hostile witness?”

“Yes. Next up, you’re getting all your medical and psychotherapy records and you’re suing the state senators who sent that report to the Bar.”

“For what? I’m the one who bribed a witness.”

“You gave her a loan.” 

“Whatever words you want to use to describe what I did, the bottom line is that I gave a witness money to ensure she’d appear on the stand the next day, knowing she’d use it for a fix, knowing I was endangering her life, and she died.” 

“You didn’t deserve to have your judicial aspirations taken away like that.”

“Rita,” he warned, swiveling his chair from side to side, “I don’t have a case, and if I sued, I’d look like the worst sore loser in the history of the Bar.”

“Three: you’re to follow up with the Hudson Law dean about picking up two classes this summer. You don’t belong in criminal defense, you belong on the bench or behind the prosecutor’s table or in front of a lecture hall and everybody from Olivia Benson to Abuela Catalina knew that.”

“You’ve got a second career as a life coach ahead of you.”

Rita flipped her middle finger in his face. “And fourth, you’d better apologize to Olivia, because I can’t imagine what she must be feeling. Marianne told me you were going to check in with Olivia about a conflict of interest before you made a decision about representing Carly, and I said to myself, if Olivia decided to murder you after you asked her that, I’d represent her and the jury would set her free in ten seconds.”

“On what statute?”

“On what statute,” she repeated, mocking him. “I’m on her side if she never forgives you.”

“Thanks, Rita.”

She stopped to take a breath, then laid a hand on Barba’s shoulder. “What you said before about your decision-making skills, I agree.”

“Are you saying you were worried about me?”

“I would never.” She leaned against the door, her fingers on the handle. “You’re my friend. We look out for each other. Now, that’s the most sentimental thing I’ve got in my repertoire. You’re an asshole. Do what I said, and then grovel in Olivia’s direction. Grovel hard.”

—- 

“Are you all right, Lieutenant?” Pippa Cox asked. She and Benson were alone at the round table in SVU’s conference room — really a corner of the squadroom shielded from view by a single wall — with file folders, two laptops, and a tablet in front of them. 

“Yes. Just fine.”

Benson took a sip of ginger ale, which did nothing for the nausea threatening to blow her cover.

She rubbed her eyes, which started to tear up involuntarily. 

_Give it until week 12, you’re not far, the nausea usually lets up after that_, the nurse had promised her when she went in for blood tests.

Screening tests. 

But she was still furious at Barba.

“Lieutenant?”

“Call me Liv, please,” she said, coming out of her exhausted, agitated stupor.

“We’ve got the feds on board for sure?”

“They need city resources to get Billy. They don’t want to sentence an innocent woman either.”

“More like they don’t want to be the ones blamed for sentencing an innocent woman,” Pippa said with a smirk.

“Look, the crime happened in Manhattan. It was a murder-one-level crime committed by a minor. That’s you and me, that’s our purview. But SVU needs the feds, too, because I think the reason that our guys aren’t finding the weapon is that it’s somewhere in the Mississippi River or the Gulf of Mexico.”

“The Mississippi River is west of Alabama.”

“Is it?”

“Mississippi?” Pippa suggested, smiling.

“Ha. Yes. In any case, there may be more people involved. According to what Dennis’s sister told us, he was involved with some shady characters in Alabama.”

“But,” Pippa said, “if there’s an actual adult involved, there’s no way I’ll be able to charge Billy as an adult, whatever evidence you might have. There are statutes meant to protect the thousands and thousands of minors who are nothing like Billy.”

Carisi appeared from the other side of the wall, cradling his own laptop. “Can I offer my two cents?”

Benson pulled out a chair for him. Carisi picked up her can of ginger ale, and examined it for a moment before setting it back down. She rolled her eyes. “You have a problem?”

“If you’ve got indigestion, you need the kind with real ginger in it. It doesn’t work if you’re drinking the kind that only tastes like ginger.”

“My gastroenterologist, Sonny Carisi,” Benson said to Pippa.

“Anyway, all of us know what the profile of a family annihilator looks like, and it’s not Billy. It’s a very specific profile, and like Rollins said, every single perp in history has fit the profile.”

“Except here the crime itself doesn’t fit the profile.”

“Billy’s abusive and was a danger to Carly and the kids, but you’ve got to admit that the profile is a little off.”

Benson shook her head. “For now, the focus is Billy.”

“You sure your gut isn’t affected by —”

“Excuse me?” Benson interrupted, anger now bubbling up to meet the seasick feeling in her chest. 

“By your experience with William Lewis.”

Oh.

Of course. 

“He’s not Lewis’s son,” Benson said. “That has to be an unfounded rumor.”

“Speaking of which, has anybody located an original birth certificate yet?” Pippa asked.

Carisi shook his head. “There’s no record of this kid ever being born.”

“I’m working on compelling DNA, but the judge will only let us use it for a very narrow purpose.”

“I checked with every clerk’s office in Florida and Alabama,” Carisi said, “but we turned up nothing. One clerk told me it’s possible he was born at home and his birth was never registered.”

“Who’s his mother?” was Pippa’s next question. 

“There’s a lot we don’t know.”

“All I need,” Benson said, “is evidence that Billy, not Carly, killed the three children. That’s all. I don’t care who his birth parents were. What matters is that Dennis didn’t use the money he got from faking his ex-wife’s death for what he said he was going to use it for, and 14 years later, it led to this.”

“The ex is cooperating with the feds,” Carisi said, “and you’ve got to admit something’s funny about the fact that Carly showed up in Florida to warn Teresa — Talia, her alias all these years — that Dennis had a hit out on her, when nobody else was supposed to know she was alive.”

“Maybe Carly was trying to get Dennis killed,” Pippa said, covering a slight flinch in her expression.

“Real long way to get somebody killed, especially when Carly couldn’t have known for sure that Teresa would react by killing Dennis.”

Benson’s head was pounding, an ache in her temples threatening to push her eyes out from the inside. “Evidence. All we need is evidence that Billy killed his siblings. End of story.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Do you want to know the sex?” Dr. Melody Haor asked Benson after her exam, when she was sitting in the gynecologist’s office, on the opposite side of her desk.

“This early?”

“The screening predicts it with up to 99 percent accuracy, almost a hundred if you haven’t been pregnant in the last ten years and the fetus is male.”

“Wow.”

“I’m still recommending amniocentesis on account of your age, but I can tell you what came up on the screening panel.”

“All right.”

“97 percent chance of no chromosomal disorders, 99.7 percent chance you’re having a boy.”

“Noah will appreciate that, I’m sure.”

“You’ve told him?”

“I’d feel better about waiting until I’m at the halfway point.”

“I understand,” Dr. Haor said. “Olivia, I wanted to talk to you about something, but it would mean I’d have to transfer you to another doctor in our practice.”

Benson slid forward in her chair. “Of course,” she said, assuming that the doctor was going to disclose a sexual assault.

“The three kids who were killed on the Upper West Side, is that your case?”

“Yes.” _Why?_ she wondered.

“The news last night —” Dr. Haor stopped, silently hyperventilating for a moment.

“Take your time,” Benson said, but she was starting to panic too. Eight million people in New York City, and the gynecologist she’d been seeing for five years was connected to the murder she was currently investigating.

“They said there were rumors that the family was connected to William Lewis. If this is a problem for you, I can go to someone else.”

Eight million people in New York City. Eight and a half if you counted Staten Island.

(_Staten Island is a part of New York City, you have to count Staten Island,_ Carisi would have said loudly.)

“You can tell me.” She wanted the doctor to share what she knew before she changed her mind, before they lost whatever evidence she might lead them to.

“My brother knew William Lewis. We’re from southern Alabama, near the border with Florida. He was obsessed with Lewis, to the point that he walked around for two years telling everybody that he was Lewis’s lawyer, that he was the reason all the witnesses were afraid to testify.”

Benson’s next question was _did he ever pretend to be a law professor?_ but, for the sake of evidence, she knew she was better off letting Dr. Haor share that information without being prompted. 

“I thought about saying something two weeks ago, when I read about Dennis’s murder. I should have brought it up then, and I’m sorry I didn’t. When Dennis was in his twenties, my brother Jon convinced him that he’d been re-admitted to the law school he’d already failed out of twice. I don’t know how he pulled it off, and it seemed not innocent, per se, but like he was playing an elaborate trick on a naive man for laughs.” She folded her hands on her desk and stared down at her calendar. “I should have come forward then. I should have come forward a long time ago.”

“Your brother —”

“Jon Cady. He uses our stepfather’s last name. He pretended to be a lawyer and a law professor for years, just to get information on what Lewis was up to, and maybe to take Dennis for a ride.”

“Okay. Can you come down to the precinct and give an official statement?”

“Yes. I should have said something years ago, but I was out of medical school already, almost done with my residency, and I was looking for work as far away as I could get from that group of people.”

“There was a group of them?”

“The William Lewis fan club, is what I used to say.” 

“What matters is that you’re coming forward now. You couldn’t have stopped Lewis.”

“No, but I could have stopped my brother from taking advantage of Dennis. Jon and his girlfriend had a little baby boy. I never met him. They were probably afraid I’d report them to child services. Jon told everyone who would listen that the baby was really William Lewis’s. His girlfriend left him, she left him with their son, I couldn’t believe it.”

“Do you know where she is now?”

“I don’t, but she was still alive and well in Pensacola when I moved to New York. I checked. I was worried. The 17-year-old, Billy, that’s got to be Jon’s son, he even looks like him. That’s the toddler Jon convinced Dennis to adopt.”

“Why was there no birth certificate?”

“Probably because he was born at home. Jon didn’t trust hospitals or doctors or government records.”

“Maybe because he was pretending to be a law professor,” Benson suggested.

“Only to Dennis. After I left, Jon doubled down on insisting that his son was really Lewis’s, which makes me wonder if Dennis also believed he’d adopted Lewis’s son.”

“Okay. Wait one minute, and I’ll take you to the precinct.”

In the hallway outside the OB/GYN office, Benson called Fin to update him on the unexpected break in their case. The feds were going to need to search from Mobile to Pensacola for Jon Cady and possibly the murder weapon. 

After Benson brought Dr. Haor to her colleagues at SVU, she called Barba. His phone went directly to voicemail.

“Rafael,” she said, “regardless of the decisions you’ve made, we need to talk. No matter what, you and I need to sit down for a long conversation. Please call me.”

—

At 9 that night, Benson received a text from a non-US number that read _Still here. You’re haunted forever. Just like I promised.— WL_

She called Captain Dodds at home, followed by Fin, then Rollins, then Carisi. Noah was sleeping in the next room. A threat from someone pretending to be William Lewis was not something she could keep to herself. In fact, she was going to do what Melody Haor probably should have done fifteen years ago: tell everyone. 

Someone _pretending_ to be William Lewis, she had to remind herself. Jon Cady, Billy Clyde, anyone, _anyone_ else. William Lewis was dead, she’d seen it herself, he was dead, she told herself again and again. 

Dodds sent a detail out right away.

Rollins called her at 10, and again at 11, to make sure she was all right.

Carisi called at 11:30, when Benson’s eyes were still wide open. “Liv, a couple unis and I are coming over,” he said.

He never called her Liv. This was bad. “Why?”

“We’re taking you and Noah to a safehouse. About an hour ago, Barba’s neighbors heard a loud crash at his apartment and saw two guys take out a rolled up carpet and throw it in the trunk of a car. The driver is Dr. Haor’s brother. They saw it go through the Lincoln Tunnel on the E-Z Pass cameras, but nothing since then.”


	9. Chapter 9

Barba stared ahead into darkness for what must have been hours; after a while, he was able to make out vague patterns inside the trunk of his captors’ car. He knew there was a sliver of open space behind him, which would have meant a possibility for escape if only his wrists and ankles weren’t bound, if only that sliver of open space didn’t lead to the backseat of the car where one of the two men who’d wrapped him up and thrown him into the trunk sat. 

His only saving grace for the moment was that they’d untangled him from the carpet. Still, he had no idea what they planned to do with him. He tried not to think about that. 

He stared ahead into the darkness. 

He prayed they’d stop for gas, for food, for anything. They didn’t. The car didn’t stop once. The men — there were three of them, the two who’d carried him to the car and the driver, he assumed — must have had bladders of steel, or were peeing in bottles as they drove along what Barba guessed was a lonely highway. 

His head was bleeding. He hoped that his relatively clarity of mind meant that the injuries were exclusively external. 

There were three men in the car, he repeated to himself, in case he lucked out and got to be a witness instead of a corpse. Three men with Southern accents, maybe Florida panhandle, Gulf Coast, which made sense with regards to what they were talking about.

They were dumb enough to talk about a lot of different people involved with Lewis and the Clydes, smart enough not to address each other by their own names.

“We’re not touching her,” one of the men said. “That’s not what he’d have wanted.”

“Your gift to him,” another man said, laughing.

“Fuck off until you shut Teresa up for good.”

They were planning to kill Teresa, the neighbor Barba had known as Talia, and he repeated this to himself too so that he could warn the police that she needed to be protected in prison. 

So that he could warn the police, if he survived.

“Teresa doesn’t know anything. If that moron Dennis ever tried to put a hit on anybody, he’d probably wind up talking to an FBI agent on his first go.”

“I’ll bet you’re glad he’s dead.”

“Eh, he served a purpose.”

“At least he can’t talk now. He’d have talked.”

“He had no clue what was going on.”

“Yeah. Moron.”

“Teresa was smart, though.”

“Don’t worry about Teresa. I’m not worried about her. As long as Olivia’s grieving and scared for the rest of her life, I’m doing —”

“The Lord’s work?”

“Fuck off.” 

“What your hero would have wanted.”

“What I want.”

Barba struggled to process everything he was hearing, to pay no attention to the blood oozing from his right temple or the fear rising up in his stomach. _As long as Olivia’s grieving and scared for the rest of her life._ He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t. He shut his eyes and tried to strategize, ignoring the tears welling up behind his eyelids. 

He opened his eyes again when the car seemed to veer sharply off the road. He heard a loud _smash_, metal vibrating against metal as his body rolled forward in the trunk.

The sound of doors flying open, followed by gunshots. 

Five gunshots that left a horrific ring in his ears. He counted them just in case, but his trembling limbs told him that this was the end. 

A “fuck it, we’re done here,” and the sound and smell of tires burning rubber. 

Another car screeching to a halt. Someone screaming: _He’s trying to drive the car off the bridge._

Liv’s face. 

Her hand over her heart, her furrowed brow, mouth askew, conveying worry and sympathy and love on that afternoon when he had to own up to what happened to Ashtonja Abreu’s mother, in front of the New York State Bar.

Her smile when they won an important case. Her hand clutching his.

The car rolled back, and then slammed forward again. He could feel the driver’s anger.

He was about to be sent over the railing of a bridge while bound inside the trunk of a car, and there was no way out. Struggling to suppress a scream, he let out a wail. 

And then, for a split second, an image of his abuelita, all the dreams she had for him twinkling in her eyes, almost as if he’d never let her down.

—

The doorman had been knocked out. CSU found bloodstains on Barba’s kitchen counter. There wasn’t a lot of blood, though, Rollins assured Benson, which meant that Barba had likely been taken alive.

Knowing that he’d been thrown into the trunk of Jon Cady’s car, wrapped in a swath of carpet while some part of his body was bleeding, did not offer Benson much relief.

Rollins and two uniformed officers brought her and Noah to a hotel near the New York-New Jersey border, a three-star place with a queen sized bed in the middle of the room, a dresser with a television on top of it, and little else. Noah, who was still in his pajamas from when they’d left their apartment in a rush, asked his mother if Uncle Rafa had been taken away by the same bad guy who’d kidnapped her before he was born. “How did you know about that, sweet boy?” she asked.

Noah shrugged.

“I hear you talking on the phone, sometimes, with Aunt Amanda, with other people.”

“You don’t need to worry about any of that, ever,” Benson said, struggling to keep her voice flat. “All of that happened before you were born. You’re safe. You’re always safe.”

Noah fell asleep as soon as he climbed into bed, leaving Benson wide awake, alone with her fears for Barba. She’d hoped Noah would want her to hold him for a while, but he was already softly snoring on the other end of the bed. 

She reached for her phone. If she couldn’t sleep, she’d work. 

She opened Carly’s Instagram page and stared for a moment at the most recent picture, which was now more than a month old, the happy family smiling on the snow-covered lawn of their North Fork home. An insomnia-and-hormone induced conjecture came to mind: how much plastic surgery had Carly had, and whatever happened to Jon Cady’s girlfriend in Pensacola who Dr. Haor hadn’t checked up on in fourteen years?

There was no way.

There were a hundred other reasons why Carly might have had plastic surgery on her facial features, most of them, Benson observed from the photos. A hundred other reasons, but if Carly by some chance was the ex-girlfriend who Dr. Haor had mentioned, then she was Billy’s birth mother, and that explained why she was going to such lengths to protect the teenager.

Of course, she might have thought of him as a son either way. 

Jon Cady had fooled Dennis into believing that he was a law professor, his advisor in a law program that he hadn’t been admitted to. Dennis Clyde was not a smart man. 

Benson texted Fin: _I know you’re asleep, but if they keep me here for another day you’re in charge, so make sure they take Cady alive, he’s a suspect in our murder. Make sure they run all weapons. Could be our weapon, could be him covering for one of our other suspects._ Whatever happened, they needed to get justice for the three murdered children whose parents’ whims and general stupidity had led to a horrific disaster. 

And Carly’s plastic surgery didn’t mean anything. Benson didn’t even know what Billy’s birth mother looked like. She was making conjectures based in imagination; certainly nothing more than bad detective work. 

The text message from the person pretending to be Lewis came to mind again: _You’re haunted forever. Just like I promised._

If only Jon Cady, allegedly William Lewis’s number one fan, had known how easily he could have conveyed that message to her without hurting Barba, without even sending the text in the first place, he wouldn’t have had to drag anyone else down into her already-haunted world.

Lewis was with her forever, in her scars, in her memories, in the remnants of himself he’d left with the Clydes, and with Jon Cady. He’d kept his word.

—

_Just let it be over quickly,_ Barba thought, his bound limbs trembling as the car slammed into the railing again. 

He heard sirens.

The sirens were close, very close. He shut his eyes tight and hoped that whatever those sirens were attached to would arrive in time.

The sirens got closer. The car rocked back and forth. 

A _pop_, followed by a welcome breeze from the outside, the first sign that Barba might survive this ordeal.

“Can you tell me your name, sir?”

“Rafael Barba.” He was surprised by the breathlessness, the weakness, in his own voice. “The men who — they were talking about —”

“Mr. Barba, don’t strain yourself. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“They were talking about Lieutenant Olivia Benson of NYPD.” The words came out in spurts and wheezes. “You need to make sure she’s safe. They were talking about her, about leaving her grieving and scared for the rest of her life. Make sure she’s safe, please —”

The officer who’d opened the trunk cut the ties on Barba’s wrists and ankles and told him not to move until the paramedics got there.

When the paramedics finally lifted him out of the trunk, he looked up at the stars and was certain that it was the middle of the night and he was far from the city, far from any city, in fact. They were indeed on a bridge, just as he’d thought, as the person screaming about — no, he didn’t want to think about that, he didn’t want to ruminate on what might have happened minutes ago — but, yes, the front of the car had been rammed through a barrier. 

He’d been seconds from death. 

Two men lay dead on the ground behind the car. A third, bleeding from his left arm, was being mirandized by the police. 

“Mr. Barba?”a paramedic prompted when he was strapped on to the stretcher. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Where are we?”

“A few miles east of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”

“Oh. All right.” He didn’t know what to make of that. He was half relieved to be alive, half unsure that what had just happened was real.

“Can you tell me your name and what year it is?”

“Rafael Barba, 2019.”

2019, or one year since the end of the world, one year since he’d learned that applying for a judicial appointment, the thing that had once been his dream, his dream and his grandmother’s dream, would turn out to be the worst move he’d ever made. 

The worst move he’d ever made other than leaving town without telling anyone, especially Olivia, where he was going. 

“You’re safe now,” the paramedic said. 

At those words of reassurance, Barba realized that he was still crying. He hadn’t cried in public since, well, since the end of the world a year ago, and even then, it had been nothing more than tears welling up in his eyes. 

Tonight, his cheeks were wet and his breaths came in heavy sobs. “Did they hear me before?” he asked. “They need to alert Lieutenant Olivia Benson of NYPD. These men are going after people she — after people in her life. Make sure she’s protected.”

—

At 3AM, Benson’s cell phone rang, interrupting her deep dive into Carly’s social media activity.

“Barba’s alive, and safe,” Rollins told her. “The car he was in crashed on a bridge on I-81 in Pennsylvania. Cady might have crashed it on purpose. He shot his two accomplices and tried to drive the car off the bridge.”

“How is Barba?” Benson asked.

“Officer from Pennsylvania state police I spoke to said he’s shaken up, was asking after you the whole time, wanted to know if you were safe. Kozlov wants one of us to drive out there and get him, so we keep the Clyde murders close to NYPD’s chest.”

“Good for Kozlov.”

“I’m driving out to get him in the morning. Do you want to come? Cady’s in custody, which means you and Noah are going home tomorrow.”

“No. That’s all right. My body and the all-day morning sickness can’t handle the drive. I’ll talk to him when I come back. About last year, I mean. What he went through with the Bar. How he left. That’s what I want to talk about, when he’s ready.”

—

Barba instructed Rollins to pick up a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweater from his apartment as soon as the detectives and federal investigators had cordoned off the kitchen, where he’d been hit by a vase and rolled up in a carpet that Cady and company had brought. He changed into the clothes at the hospital, and attempted to fix his hair with his fingers and the bottle of dry shampoo a nurse had thrown his way.

“How are you feeling?” Rollins asked after he slowly lowered himself into the front seat of her car.

“Terrific. I spent half the night in the trunk of a car and half the night in the emergency room. It was a delight.”

“Liv and Noah were in a safehouse.”

“I hope she was able to get some sleep.”

“She’s exhausted, Rafael.” She took her eyes off the road for a moment to look at him, then turned her gaze forward again. “You don’t know the half of it.”

They drove in silence for a while, and then he fell asleep for an hour or so with his hand over his face. When he woke up, he could see in the passenger side rearview mirror that his cheeks were puffy and his eyes were bloodshot.

“I heard you did good,” Rollins said.

“In that I managed to stay alive and not choke on my own vomit?”

“Sorry I brought it up.”

“Last year,” Barba said, adjusting his position so he wasn’t slumped over, “I got another death threat, right before I was supposed to appear before the Bar. It was a text message. Whoever sent it said the COs were hoping I’d be sentenced to a few weeks in prison for what I’d done, because a few weeks was all they needed.”

“You should have told us. That’s got to be connected to whatever asshole hired that guy Heredio. Carisi and I were never able to lock that down.”

“The text message was signed “William Lewis”.” 

“What the fuck?” Rollins couldn’t help asking.

“That’s why I didn’t tell you. Liv didn’t need to hear about it. She was already trying to fix everything for me, figuring out who she could talk to in the state senate, the Bar, who she could give a piece of her mind to, and the last thing she needed was to revisit the Lewis trauma.”

“Aw, Rafael.”

“Excuse me?”

“You love her.”

As soon as she said the three words, Rollins quickly bit her lip.

“I’m not in the mood for teasing about whether Liv’s my schoolyard crush, on account of the twenty-five stitches in my head.”

“The nurse said twenty.”

“Feels like five hundred,” Barba grumbled. He had every right to grumble.

“You really haven’t seen Liv since last February?”

“I’ve been to her place a few times since I came back, not that it’s any of your business, and we ran into each other at a conference. Otherwise, no.”

“The conference she went to in …” Rollins stopped talking, the end of her sentence trailing off into a long hum.

“December.”

“Ra-fa-el.” She enunciated each syllable carefully, avoiding the “y” that usually crept in. “I’m glad you made it out of that car alive, I’m sorry for what you had to go through last night, but you really need to talk to Liv as soon as you get home.”


	10. Chapter 10

“How’s your colleague doing?” Benson asked the doorman in Barba’s lobby. 

She and Captain Ray Kozlov were awaiting Barba’s return. Benson had asked Kozlov to give Barba a break, maybe let him sleep first, especially since he’d already spoken to federal investigators at the hospital. Kozlov told her that the feds were sending Captain Alexandra Eames, who Benson had worked with a few times before, to form a joint task force. Homicide, the feds, and SVU were going to work together to solve and prosecute this particularly gruesome crime. 

“Just a concussion, thank God,” the doorman said. “My wife and I are going to see him after my shift today. He said a couple detectives have been to see him already.”

“Let him know we’re sorry he was put through this.”

Barba arrived a few minutes later, escorted by Rollins. His face fell and his shoulders slumped when he saw the two commanding officers in his lobby. 

The side of his head was bruised and flecked with dried blood. A white bandage extended from his hairline to his eyebrow. His hair was cowlicked in six or seven different directions, and there was a frown on his face, the likes of which Benson hadn’t seen since the day when Alex Muñoz had been arraigned, five and a half years ago. 

She wanted to hug him.

She wouldn’t do that in front of Kozlov, even though Kozlov, wrapped in a conflict of interest of his own, was hardly one to talk. 

They went upstairs together, all four of them, to the apartment Barba was renting in the building where he used to own a co-op. He’d put that co-op on the market after the state senate rejected his judicial application and reported his indiscretion to the Bar, and closed on a sale days after he left for Miami. 

They sat around the coffee table, with Barba at one end of the couch, Benson at the other, Kozlov in an oversized armchair, and Rollins on a dining chair that she’d pulled away from the table nearby.

Barba flatly recounted the events of the previous night for what must have been the third time in ten hours. 

Benson’s heart broke for him, the blank expression he’d put on so that talking about what had happened wouldn’t force him to actually remember what had happened in vivid detail. 

Thankfully Kozlov was done with his questions in fifteen minutes. He left with Rollins, while Benson hung back.

They were standing by the door where they’d just waved the detective and homicide captain off when Benson took two steps closer and hugged Barba tight.

“I’m okay, Liv,” he said, sniffing a harsh breath in through his nose. “I promise.” He broke the embrace so that he could look at her. “But you’re not. What’s going on? Cady’s in custody, and Lewis has been in hell for a long time.”

“You should, um, are you allowed to take a shower?”

“That bad, huh?” he said, a gentle smirk on his lips.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said, rubbing his back.

“For what it’s worth, I was an asshole last week for not immediately saying no to representing Carly Clyde.”

“I agree, but that doesn’t matter now. It’s in the past.”

“The very recent past,” Barba reminded her. He lowered his eyebrows, his expression shifting to deep concern as she continued rubbing his back. “I’m not a defense attorney. I’m not a _good_ defense attorney. But I needed money if I was going to come back to New York.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. Benson clutched his hand. “It’s all right,” she promised. “It’s over. You’re home now.”

“I’m glad.” He opened his eyes again. “Come here,” he said, drawing her back into an embrace. “We’ve been meaning to talk for two weeks now.”

“We have a lot to talk about, but you need a shower and a meal and a few hours’ sleep.”

They ordered lunch in, since Barba’s fridge was empty. Barba showered with the cap the hospital had sent him home with, and tried to style his hair with dry shampoo to no avail. 

“It’s cute,” Benson offered as they stood together in front of the mirror over his dresser in the bedroom. 

“My head wound is cute?”

“Take a nap, Rafael.” He was dressed in sweatpants and a Harvard T-shirt, and his eyelids were heavy.

He turned to face her. “When do you have to be home?”

“Six. Noah thinks it’s a normal workday. He asked me last night if the man who took you was the same man who took me before he was born.” She leaned in to graze his injured temple with her fingertips, and her voice started to break. “I don’t want him to know that you were hurt.”

She saw in his eyes the same heartbreak, the same vulnerability that was in them the day he told her what had happened when he appeared before the state senate. She’d seen that back in December, too, on the night when she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in anything more than getting their long-simmering sexual tension out of their respective systems.

She had to gather up the courage to tell him, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted to see the shock or dismay in his face, or hear declarations of loyalty to her and the baby, if that was what was coming. They still hadn’t talked about last year. They still hadn’t talked about how badly he’d wounded her already-wounded psyche, but he was in no condition to deal with that now. He was barely in any condition to hear about the pregnancy in the first place, but she was already wearing a nylon band that allowed her to unbutton her pants without bringing on suspicion, and she was a week or two away from having to buy and borrow maternity clothes. She had to tell him before she started showing.

He touched her face, swiping his thumb back and forth across her cheekbone. “You look exhausted.”

“Which is funny, because all the websites say by now I should be glowing.” She cringed, waiting for Barba to react. He merely tilted his head in confusion. “Rafa, the night we were together in December, I very improbably got pregnant.”

He wrinkled his forehead, twisted his lips, and then blinked what must have been at least thirty times. 

“Now,” she said before he could get a single word out, “I’d been thinking about taking in another child if the opportunity presented itself, so I’ve made the decision that I’m going to have a baby in September. It’s up to you how involved you want to be.”

He sat at the edge of the bed, still processing the news. She continued: “I’m thinking about retiring and taking a consulting job, I don’t know yet, but I’d just ask you for minimal financial help. I’ve already thought a lot of this through, and I know you’re at a crossroads in your life and career, so —”

“Liv,” was all he could say as large, round tears sprang from his left eye.

“Do you know you’re only crying from one eye?”

“The doctor said it’s only temporary. If the gash was any deeper I’d have permanently lost the ability to raise one eyebrow.”

“You’d have lost your smirk.”

“This is surprising,” he admitted, clutching the comforter in his fists, “but —”

She sat with him and gently touched his arm. “It’s okay. You don’t have to commit to anything. I’m not asking you to. I’ll make sure —”

“Surprising, but good.” He scooted closer to her, resting a forearm near her lower back. “Right?”

“Surprising news when you’ve been in perimenopause for three years and you’ve been told you can’t get pregnant for at least three years before that.”

“We’ll figure this out,” he said.

“No figuring until you’ve had a nap.”

He wiped his cheek with his open palm. “Liv, I —”

“Do you want me to stay? I don’t have to be home until 6.”

“Whatever you’d like.”

“You had a scary night. If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. If you’re more comfortable on your own, I’ll go. No worries, I understand better than anyone.”

“Stay. Please.”

“I will.”

Barba climbed into bed, under the covers. “Not that I need you to tuck me in,” he joked. “I’ve already put you through enough.”

“None of what happened last night was your fault.”

“I know. I just —”

“Need to sleep.”

“I slept for an hour in Rollins’s car.”

“Rafa.” She walked to the other side of the bed, lifted the comforter, and joined him. “I know it’s hard to close your eyes. But you have to try, and you have to push through a little, because otherwise it’s going to be worse. I’ll talk you through it if you need me to.”

He closed his eyes. She held his hand.

She knew what he was dealing with, even if he wasn’t willing to put his terror into words.

He was almost certainly seeing flashes of the previous night, of being trapped inside the trunk of a car headed over the edge of a bridge, behind his eyes. And maybe the news of the pregnancy had brought images of his own childhood to the forefront of his mind. 

He fell asleep. Exhausted from the previous night, she fell asleep too.

When she woke up, the clock radio on the dresser told her it was 5pm; they’d slept for three hours.

Barba opened his eyes and drowsily ran his fingers through her hair. She scooted closer to him. 

He licked his lower lip. His eyes were smiling. 

He continued petting her hair, and for the moment, regardless of how desperately Barba needed to brush his teeth again, she was comforted.

“We’ll figure it out,” he promised.

“You don’t have to make any decisions yet. I don’t want to push this on you while you’re still —”

“I was seeing a therapist in Miami because after everything that happened last year, after finding out that the worst thing the state senate can say in response to a judicial appointment is actually much, much worse than “no,” I couldn’t make simple decisions anymore. I made a bad decision by resigning, and I made a horrendous one by leaving, by treating you the way I did when you went out of your way to help me. I was so frozen I couldn’t decide what to have for dinner half the time. But this,” he said, moving his hand from her hair to gingerly touch her belly, “is the first time I’ve felt _sure_ about anything in more than a year.”


	11. Chapter 11

Benson was back at work the next day, meeting with Captain Alexandra Eames about the joint task force that would include the two of them, Captain Kozlov, SVU’s senior detectives, Manhattan Corporate Counsel Pippa Cox and, a few weeks down the line, a special prosecutor. Eames quietly mentioned to Benson that there were rumors about two of the people who’d be working together on the team, and asked Benson to please address those rumors tactfully and encourage the people involved to disclose what they needed to disclose before the joint task force investigation officially started. 

Like Benson, Eames knew that everything William Lewis touched — or everything that touched William Lewis — somehow turned to mistrial.

She called Carisi into her office that afternoon. “Kozlov and I are on the joint task force that the feds are forming to handle this case, and so are you, Rollins, and Fin. Captain Alex Eames is in charge. You’ve met her. She won’t stand for an undisclosed relationship on the team, and I’m sure the special prosecutor won’t either, given that we’re dealing with the William Lewis Fan Club.”

Carisi rubbed the back of his neck. “No way in for the defense attorneys, I got you, I get it. Ray’s been saying exactly what you’ve been saying for the last two weeks.”

“Then, please.”

“My parents had our neighbors from up the block over to play pinochle two, three nights a week.” Carisi paced the floor, and Benson prepared herself for a Once Upon a Time in Staten Island story. “I remember when I was twelve, there were two main topics of conversation: how stupid Mary Jo was for staying with Joey, and who in the neighborhood was sleeping with who.”

Benson sat on the couch beneath the window that looked out into the squadroom, certain she was in for a long haul with this story. But it was also probably worth listening to, and Carisi probably needed someone to listen to it.

“They’d say all this out loud in front of us, where me or one of my sisters might be watching TV in the living room and they’d be at the kitchen table and all that mattered to them was not cursing in front of us, that was all they were ever careful about. So they’d be like, “I’m worried about Bobby from down the block, he left his girlfriend for a guy, I heard, and I mean, I’m a nice person, I don’t judge, to each their own, but that’s just not fair to the girlfriend.” Or, about another neighbor, “I told Pauline not to let Jenny accept that scholarship from the all-girls’ college, or you know what’ll happen with her. Not that I have any problems with that, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t want Jenny to have to miss out on a wedding and babies, all the happy stuff, when she’s one of the ones who looks like she has a choice, if you know what I mean.” This is what I remember. This is the crap that sticks in my head.”

“They don’t realize,” Benson said, folding her hands and leaning forward, “how kids, even kids who grow up to be empathetic Special Victims detectives, internalize conversations like that for the rest of their lives.” 

“Yeah,” Carisi said, pressing one shoulder to the wall. “But they were good people because they never said _fuck_ in front of the kids, is what they thought, is what they still think. Sticks with you hard. Anyway, we filled out the paperwork for disclosure yesterday. Like I said, Ray’s been on my case about it, especially since the murders. He’ll bring the paperwork upstairs when we’re all at 1PP on Wednesday.”

That made Benson feel somewhat better about the case they were building. Now, all she needed was evidence in favor of one of their three suspects: Billy Clyde; Jon Cady, who was almost certainly Billy’s birth father; or Carly Clyde, who Benson still conjectured — without any court-admissible evidence — was Billy’s birth mother, part of a scam or revenge plot cooked up by her and Cady fifteen years ago. 

—

Benson pushed her theory for the first time with the joint task force a week later, when they were all gathered in a conference room at 1PP. They were waiting for Carisi and the special prosecutor. Carisi arrived just as Benson was finished explaining why Carly Clyde might have been Laurel Peary, Jon Cady’s ex-girlfriend and Billy’s mother, with plastic surgery and a name change.

“As I’m sure the special prosecutor will tell you,” Pippa said, “that won’t fly in court.”

Carisi had a grin on his face when he sat at the table. 

“What’d you do, Carisi?” Fin asked from the other end of the room. 

“All name changes have to be published in a local newspaper, sometimes two, depending on the judge,” Carisi said, removing a tablet from his bag. “It causes a lot of grief and a lot of danger for our domestic violence survivors, and that policy should be changed, but I can tell you that Laurel Peary of Pensacola Florida changed her name to Carly Ann Lewis in 2005.”

“That’s why Carly didn’t exist before then,” Benson said. “Nice work, Carisi.”

“Name change was published in the Irish Record and an Italian language paper. When Carly confessed, she never bothered to tell anybody about the name change.”

“She might have changed it to keep Cady off her back,” Kozlov suggested. 

Eames shook her head. “Then why would she change her name to Lewis? We’re looking at the William Lewis Fan Club here.” She turned a pair of sympathetic eyes towards Benson. “It’s what Dr. Haor called her brother and his friends.”

The door to the conference room opened and Benson was surprised to see Barba walk in, _swagger_ perhaps, in a dark navy pinstriped three-piece suit, blue shirt, and coordinated tie and pocket square. Save for the stitches on the side of his head, he looked exactly like the Rafael Barba she’d worked with for six years. He laid his briefcase on the table and sat next to Pippa.

“Special Prosecutor Rafael Barba,” Pippa said. “I trust you all know him. I encouraged him to apply for the position when it came up a few days ago.”

“Way to stick it to Cady,” Eames said, biting her lip, not looking up from the notepad in front of her. “How are we allowed to do this?”

“I answer only to the feds,” Barba said. 

“Who are investigating your kidnapping from ten days ago.” 

“Separate case. I am here on behalf of the three Clyde children. That’s the murder I will be prosecuting.” 

“For which Cady’s one of the suspects,” Eames pointed out. 

“Your bosses want me on the job.” 

Eames shrugged. “Don’t screw this up.” 

After the meeting, when they’d finished running through the patchy evidence for each of their suspects — Eames staring across the table at Barba with suppressed exasperation every time Cady was brought up — Benson pulled Barba aside. “When were you going to tell me, and how is this not going to screw up our case against Cady?” she asked.

“I was cleared by the feds as a temporary special prosecutor half an hour before I walked in the door.”

“Our team needs to present a strong case.”

“And the feds think I’m the best person for the job. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that.”

Even putting aside the fact that one of their suspects had masterminded Barba’s kidnapping and shot his two accomplices dead only a week and a half ago, a special prosecutor and lieutenant not disclosing that they were having a baby together presented a conflict of interest that could be a gift to a lucky defense attorney.

“I disclosed a conflict of interest,” Barba said, “but I wasn’t about to disclose your pregnancy before you told your bosses. I said we were in an on-again, off-again relationship.”

She couldn’t help laughing.

“Disclosure of conflict of interest without —”

“It’s a lie,” she said, mostly under her breath. “You’re on thin ice with the Bar. The last thing you need is to be caught in a lie.”

“Romance or not, you and I have had an on-again, off-again relationship for years.”

He had a point. “Thank you for not disclosing the pregnancy.”

“That’s your information to disclose, when you’re ready.”

“Rafa,” she said, grasping his arm as he turned to leave, “in that meeting just now there was a light in your eyes that I haven’t seen since before your state senate hearing. Whatever you’re doing with therapy, with your job search, keep doing it.”

“I’m also set to teach two classes at Hudson this summer, thanks to Rita putting in a good word. And I’m sticking to my therapist’s regimen. It’s working. It’s helping.”

“I admit,” Benson said as they walked out together, “about fifty percent of the reason I took care of myself psychologically after I was attacked by Lewis was my determination not to be like my former partner. That’s half the reason why I’m still on my feet, why I’m a commanding officer, why I still do what I do. I spent too many years cleaning up the messes of somebody who didn’t take care of his own psychological health, and I didn’t want anyone to have to do that for me. I’m glad you’re taking care of yourself and not running away anymore.”

“The trunk,” he said, quickly shutting his eyes and blinking them open again, “threw a lot of things into relief.”

“I can imagine.” She wanted to warn him not to say whatever came next, but to her momentary relief, he swallowed whatever declaration was in his throat. He wasn’t running, not now, but she wasn’t ready to put herself out on a limb for someone she loved who had so suddenly and overnightedly ducked out on her. “I’m going to tell my squad and the brass after my fourteen-week ultrasound,” she said.

As they stood outside on a lower Manhattan sidewalk on a late-winter early afternoon, a cold wind bringing about changes in the weather burned their ears and noses. Barba leaned in and kissed her cheek. 

She linked arms with him. “Now that our “on-again, off-again” relationship has been disclosed,” she teased, “we can walk together.”


	12. Chapter 12

On television, especially the sitcoms Benson used to watch in the decades before she’d witnessed and experienced so much trauma that their happily tone-deaf attempts at comedy made her shudder, ultrasounds were always a simple affair: a pregnant character hops up on the table, the doctor rolls a probe over her belly, she sees the baby on screen and is either moved to tears or has no idea what she’s looking at.

Benson’s bladder was precariously full as she rolled from side to side so the technician could measure every single developing organ, every limb on the fetus’s body. As the technician rotated her and pressed the probe against her pelvic bone, she reminded herself that she was an NYPD lieutenant who had been held hostage five times, who’d solved some of the most bizarre cases in the history of police work, and, no, she was not going to pee on the table.

She breathed a sigh of relief when the doctor came in to tell her that everything was fine, a reassurance she wasn’t used to hearing after all the trials and tribulations and hostage situations of her adult life. 

On her way back to work, she was surprised to find Barba on a bench outside the precinct, his tan coat unbuttoned, sipping coffee from a medium paper cup that probably came from the nearby coffee cart. 

“Were you waiting for me?” she asked.

“I went up to get some transcripts, and Rollins said you were at the doctor’s, so I thought I’d ask you how it went, away from the prying eyes of the squadroom.”

“You know I don’t expect you to dive headfirst into this.”

“I’m sorry if waiting up for you seemed too —”

“We’ve both had our struggles with what “parent” means.”

“I know.”

Benson unzipped her purse and pulled out a strip of photos that the technician had printed out for her. She handed the pictures to Barba. “That’s your son,” she said plainly.

Her second surprise of the day came when Barba immediately smiled. No shudder, no hard swallow, no pensive looks, just a smile. She was glad that he was moving forward, fearful that he might fall backwards again. Her experiences over the last ten or twenty years had tattooed themselves on her weary, anxious soul.

“Yes, of course, here.” She tore two photos off the end and handed them to Barba. “I was going to wait until the halfway mark until I told Noah, but I’m calling Dodds as soon as I get upstairs and then I’m telling my squad. I think I might have to tell Noah this weekend, at least. He needs more time to get ready.”

Barba nodded, but said nothing.

“I’m not sure I’m ready yet to tell him that you’re the father, I hope you understand that.”

“I do.”

“He’ll know. I’ll tell him eventually. If you want to be in this baby’s life, I’d never in a million years deny you that. He’s lucky to have you as a father, if that’s what you want.”

That got him, as evidenced by a quick crumple of his mouth and a few blinks.

He reached for her hand. “Can I take you to lunch?”

“I already took the morning off to go to the doctor. Maternity leave is only six weeks, eight if you have a c-section. I have to save my hours.”

“You’ll eat something, though?”

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

“I know.” He moved to kiss her lips, kissing the side of her mouth instead, reminding her of the awkwardness of their yet-to-be-defined relationship.

“Have dinner with us on Friday night?” Benson asked.

“I’m there.”

“I’ll tell Noah this weekend. And you can tell your mother whenever you’re ready.”

“She and I are still not on speaking terms.”

“Still? Even after what happened to you?”

“She called to check in with me when Rollins was driving me home. Said she loved me and was glad I was okay but she wasn’t sure how she could get past my leaving without telling anyone after I was almost disbarred.”

“I’m sorry, Rafa.”

“There are things she’s done that I can’t get past either, never walking away from my father for one.” He licked his lips and looked at his feet, apparently contemplating for a moment how far he wanted to go with this particular disclosure. “I know, she didn’t have the financial means to leave and no one would have protected us if she did, so please don’t chew me out for —”

“Rafa.” She took one of his hands in both of hers and drew it to her belly. “Your SVU prosecutor brain knows why she didn’t leave, but your heart and the heart of the little boy who you were can’t understand why she didn’t protect you.”

He let out a shallow sigh and hugged her tight. 

“I’ll see you Friday night?” he asked.

“Yes. Don’t bring me any Cabernet, though, remember,” she said, hoping to bring a smile back to his face.

It worked, however briefly. Barba headed uptown to the federal offices where he was working as their joint task force’s temporary special prosecutor, and Benson went upstairs to SVU. 

—

When she returned to her office, Benson called Dodds to tell him her news, glad that she couldn’t see the double-take he almost certainly did when the 50-year-old SVU lieutenant told him that she was fourteen weeks pregnant. She then gathered her senior staff to tell them. Rollins had already known for a few weeks, ever since that morning she’d walked in on Benson crying, and Carisi’s pregnancy radar had been beeping for much of that time. Fin looked like he had a lot of questions that he (unlike Carisi) knew better than to ask.

“Are you retiring?” Carisi asked.

“No. Not until I get the overhaul of this department that Dodds has been promising me for three years. You remember what Cragen always said,” Benson told them, “nothing changes except what has to.”

—

Later that afternoon, Benson returned to the squadroom to find Carisi reading off the laptop on his desk while Rollins peeked over his shoulder. “We got something, Lieu,” Carisi said. “We finally got a new lead on the Clyde case.”

“Carisi went looking around at all the local hotels,” Rollins explained, “all the boroughs plus Long Island and Westchester too, to see if back when Alana Clyde reported them all missing, they were hiding in plain sight in their own backyard.”

“Every local hotel in 48 hours? How much overtime did you put in for this, Carisi?”

“Told you she’d say that,” Rollins teased.

“Not as much as you think. Somewhere between hotels 50 and 60, I hit paydirt.”

“Paydirt,” Rollins echoed.

“Look.” Carisi turned the screen so Benson could see. “The Frederick Hotel in Mamaroneck had Carly on their register twelve times in the last year and a half. She was always with a man — description doesn’t match Dennis or Jon or any of his crew — and a receptionist told me it was pretty clear to her that Carly and this guy were sneaking around. She recognized Carly from Instagram but didn’t want to violate her privacy.”

“An affair doesn’t mean she’s guilty of murder,” Benson reminded them. “She was an ambitious woman, a social media genius, married to Dennis, possibly because Jon Cady blackmailed her into it. Can you blame her if she was sleeping with somebody else?”

“I don’t believe she murdered those kids, because she doesn’t fit the profile for that kind of crime,” Rollins said, “and with family annihilation, even crimes that look like it, there are no outliers, no zebras. But this adds more fuel to the fire in my gut that tells me Carly’s covering for whoever did kill the kids.”

Benson sighed. “Pippa’s not going to like this, but it’s got to be Billy. She wouldn’t cover for Cady, even if she’s covered for him for a million other things, not for murdering three of her children. She would cover for Billy, especially considering that he’s not only her stepson, but also her biological son.”

“Jackson tried so hard to tell us what was happening in that family,” Carisi said, and they all shuddered together at the knowledge that the 10-year-old boy who they’d first met two years ago was no longer in the world. They had to nail down this case. They had to find out why the Clydes had disappeared in the first place, why Carly had told Dennis’s ex-wife that he’d ordered a hit on her, and whether or not Jon Cady was somehow responsible for Billy’s murdering his three younger siblings. 

Rollins rubbed her eyes. “Carly put so much up on Instagram, so much happy family stuff and parenting advice from the point of view of being an Internet parenting authority, that she created the illusion that her whole life was up there for everybody to see, an illusion that she was oversharing. That illusion let her hide a lot.”

“Now,” Benson said, “we look into this alleged affair and find a way to compel Carly to tell the whole story.”


	13. Chapter 13

On Friday morning, Benson was met by a junior detective as soon as she got off the elevator. “Lieutenant,” she said, “Carisi and the Sarge are in Interview 1. They said they wanted to see you right away.”

“Thanks.” Crossing her fingers for news of yet another break in the Clyde case, Benson left her coat and purse in her office and went to the interview room to find out what was up.

In twenty years of working with him, Benson had never seen the look of horror and stupor that was on Fin’s face as he stared at the screen on Carisi’s laptop.

“What?” she asked, alarmed.

“Carisi, leave us alone for a minute,” Fin said.

Carisi started to fold up his laptop. Fin shook his head. “Leave the computer.”

“Oh … yeah. Yeah.”

When Carisi left and shut the door behind him, Benson moved a few steps closer to Fin. “What the hell is going on?”

“The Frederick Hotel deletes their security footage every three months. Carisi’s been on them, got ‘em to give him the security footage anyway.”

“Fin, what are you so afraid to tell me?”

“Turns out the last guy forgot to clear the footage, and it goes back six months, so Carisi found two different days when Carly and her boyfriend were in the lobby.”

“If you tell me the guy on the video looks like William Lewis —”

“No. No no no. Thank God for that, I guess.” He turned the screen towards Benson and started to scroll through stills of Carly and her loverboy in the hotel lobby. “You might want to sit down.”

Benson stood hunched over the laptop instead. In one of the stills, Carly had a hand on the man’s arm. In another, he was whispering in her ear. In a third, her hand was firmly planted on his ass.

“Fuck,” Benson said.

“Tell me that’s not who I think it is.”

“No,” Benson said, “that’s exactly who you think it is.”

“Liv, I —”

“It’s fine.” She took as deep a breath as she could in the moment. “We’ll have Kozlov and Eames bring him in so he doesn’t have to pass through SVU.”

“Is he still married?”

“As far as I know, but I haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Even when they were on the outs, he always seemed like the type of guy who’d never step out on his wife, not ‘cause he was any kind of upstanding citizen or anything, but just so he —”

“So he could hold the moral high ground,” Benson said, letting all the bitterness in the world creep into her voice.

“He left the force, right? No way this is a UC operation?”

“No, he’s long gone. Working as a private investigator, or at least he was when I last heard from him five years ago.”

“All right, then. We’ll have Kozlov and Eames bring him down to 1PP for questioning, and that’ll be it.”

“Why didn’t he come forward after the kids were murdered?” Benson said hoarsely. “That doesn’t seem like him at all.”

“Maybe he’s still got PD connections he’s working with.”

“I doubt it. He burned a lot of bridges.”

“So he was afraid to admit he was stepping out on his wife. I never made him for that kind of guy, though.”

“Well.”

Fin squinted in disgust at what he read in her “well.”

Benson stared at the computer screen. 

“Don’t tell me,” Fin said. “I don’t want to know.”

Then, half a minute later: “You and him?”

“Once.”

“Did he tell you that you were first one?” Fin asked, a lot more anger (at the man on the screen) behind his question than Benson would have expected.

“We’d been partners for less than three years, I think, maybe even less than that, and I was going through a rough time. Grief turned to comfort and comfort turned to sex and … I’ve never told this to anyone other than my therapist.”

“I’ve got no reason to share.”

“For all we know, I might have been the first one, and Carly’s the most recent. But that’s why we need to keep this break in the case away from SVU. I’m more surprised than I should be about the cheating but I can’t get past the fact that he didn’t come forward as soon as the murders hit the news.”

“I’ll call Eames,” Fin said.

“Do that,” Benson said, scrubbing a hand over her face. “If, uh, she has any questions about his character, I’ll tell her what she needs to know. My skeletons are less important than getting justice for those kids, and I’d really like to know why Elliot didn’t see it that way for himself.”

—

“Do you want to talk about it?” Barba asked her that night, after Noah had gone to bed. 

Stabler was coming in with his attorney on Monday to talk to Eames and Kozlov. Barba was notified soon after the arrangements were made, but Benson hadn’t broached the topic when they ate dinner that night, in part because Noah was there, in part because the fact that Carly had been cheating on Dennis with the former SVU detective, who hadn’t come forward after three children were murdered, still seemed unreal. 

Carisi apologized to Benson for finding the tapes. She reminded him that he was only doing his job, and a good job, because he might have busted their difficult case wide open. 

Benson pulled the throw blanket from the couch down over her legs and torso. “Any discussion we have, you and I, is pillow talk,” she reminded him.

“No, it’s not.”

“What’s your legal basis for that argument, Counselor?”

He sat next to her, and she gave him half the blanket. “My legal basis is that you’re my best friend, or at least you were until I fucked up last year.”

“Where have I heard that before,” she said, the words flatter than the question they were supposed to convey, dripping with irony.

“Liv.” He opened his arms to her and she leaned into his embrace in spite of years of disappointment warning her to shut herself down. “Eames briefed me on the situation as it stands.”

“I can’t question him, obviously,” Benson said, choking back a few stray tears that she struggled to will away. “Even if it wasn’t the most ridiculous conflict of interest in the history of conflicts of interest, I don’t think I’d be able to talk to him knowing that my worst suspicions about him cheating on Kathy were true.”

“You trusted him.”

“We were partners. He had issues he didn’t take care of, but I trusted him, and I also — I believed him when he said I was the only woman he’d ever been with other than his wife.”

“Might have been true at the time.”

“That’s what I told Fin, but I’m just fooling myself.”

“I’m sorry, Liv.” With her head resting on his shoulder, he ran his fingertips over her scalp, through her hair, soothing her for the moment. “It’s rough finding out someone you cared about is actually a manipulative asshole who doesn’t have their priorities in order.”

“You and I,” she said, allowing herself to snuggle closer to him, “understand each other. I used to think Elliot and I understood each other, but, you know, he was selfish.” She hesitated for a moment, reluctant to imply she’d ever felt the same way about Barba, even though she’d called him a _selfish prick_ a million times after he resigned and disappeared without telling her. 

“Talk to me,” Barba said. 

“He was selfish because he could have taken better care of himself but didn’t. He was selfish for how he acred like marrying Kathy at 17 after he got her pregnant was the most noble thing in the world. And he was selfish because — years ago I was sexually assaulted during an undercover operation, and he couldn’t be bothered with me while I was recovering, while I was still thinking like a victim rather than a detective.”

“I didn’t know about that,” Barba said, pursing his lips in a futile attempt to mask the fury written on his face, “but how dare he not acknowledge what had happened to you. And how cruel of him to leave the way he did, without telling you, without bothering to stay in touch. Liv, I —”

“You did that too.”

“I did,” he said, the words coming out as a shallow sigh. 

“At least you found your way back.”

“Rita said I should grovel in your direction. Should I grovel?”

“I forgive you,” Benson said, turning her head to kiss his lips. She smiled against his mouth. “A little. You can grovel a little.”

Barba dramatically dropped to his knees, and Benson had to suppress a peal of laughter so she wouldn’t wake Noah. 

Barba grumbled at the pain in his joints. Benson lightly kicked him with her socked foot, and in response, Barba closed his eyes and laughed.

“I’m groveling at your feet. I will make up for all the bad decisions I made last year and for not recognizing why I should have immediately said no to representing Carly.”

Benson groaned. “I don’t want to hear another word about Carly until Monday.”

“Then I will grovel about everything else. I hope that you will accept my groveling and” — he pushed himself up a few inches and kissed her belly through her shirt — “you will too.”

“The lemon can’t hear you yet.”

“The lemon?”

He had a grin on his face, to the point that most of his teeth were showing, and she was sure that this was the first time in a long time he’d felt absolved of the guilt that had been punching him in the gut for more than a year.

“There’s an app that tells you what size fruit your baby is every week.”

Barba sat back on the floor and raised one eyebrow.

“Hey,” Benson said, “your eyebrow works again.” She carefully slid down to sit with him, then winced. “Round ligament pain,” was her explanation.

“Something else you learned from the app?”

“You learn all sorts of things, especially that half of the people on pregnancy message boards are teenagers playing make believe and scaring the crap out of everyone else by making them think rare complications are much more common than they are. I did some detective work and found out a lot of them are inspired by this one Taylor Swift song that was used to raise money for a rare blood cancer. Another, I’d say, fifth of them are just crowdfunding scammers. But everybody else, you have to be careful with, because as soon as they feel like they might be found out, or like they’re being ignored, they make up a new crisis to bind everybody else to them emotionally.”

He was watching her with sad, sloping eyes. “Liv, if you don’t want to talk about Stabler, you don’t have to.”

“It’s just interesting, how most people on those boards are — what do you call them — catfishing, after money or unhealthy emotional attachment.” 

“Then they are very lucky to have a detective amongst them.” She laid her head on his shoulder again and he drew her into a sideways embrace, adding, “and I am very lucky to have a detective amongst myself.”

“Don’t be so charming.”

He kissed her hair. “Why not?”

“Because then I’ll trust you not to break my heart again.”

“I’m sorry about Stabler, I’m sorry about me, I’m sorry about everyone who’s ever treated you like someone who’s only there to fix the problems they won’t fix themselves. I’m sorry on behalf of everyone who believed that entering a new phase of their life meant leaving you behind.”

“Yourself included?”

“Myself included.”

She broke their embrace to kiss his cheek. “You want to stay?” she asked.

He pulled back, a little surprised, and she couldn’t help laughing. “I’m still too achy for anything fun,” she said. 

“Oh no, no, I didn’t think —” he stammered apologetically, which caused her to laugh again.

“My breasts are still very sore, and from what I remember last December, you couldn’t get your mouth off of them.”

Now he joined her in her quiet laughter, but a blush was creeping up from his neck to his cheeks.

“I was going to tell Noah about the pregnancy tomorrow,” she said, “and I was thinking that if you stay, maybe we could tell him that you’re the father. Maybe.”

“I thought you weren’t ready to tell him that.”

“It’s still a big maybe.”

“Whether you tell him or not, I’m happy to stay.” 

“Even without —”

“Liv.” 

“I am so afraid,” she admitted.

“Why? The doctor said everything’s doing well.”

“I’m afraid,” she said, some of the tears she’d tried to suppress earlier springing to her eyelids, “you’ll change your mind, you’ll surprise me with another heel turn, you’ll —”

“No,” he said, kissing her lips, lingering this time, “I swear to you I won’t. When Cady hit the gas and I figured out where I was and what he was trying to do, _you_ flashed before my eyes. The first time we met, all our conversations, every time you touched my arm, for God’s sake, the disappointment and heartbreak on your face when I stupidly walked away from our friendship, even though I wasn’t there to see it, I _saw_ it when I thought I was going over the edge of that bridge. _You_ flashed before my eyes. I love you. And if I’ve been afraid of that for so many years — and God knows I have been — that’s all on me, my shame, my sin. I am here for you and our baby, and if you can’t get yourself to believe that, I understand, because I know, not to the degree that you do, but I know what it’s like when someone you thought you knew well turns out to be an awful human being.”

“Or a criminal,” Benson said.

Barba smiled sadly. “You really want me to stay?”

She squeezed his hand. “Yes.” 

“Then I’m not going anywhere.”


	14. Chapter 14

Barba was on the upper deck of a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere he’d surely never be found in his waking life, so he was half-certain he was dreaming. A warning came over the loudspeaker about turbulent waves hitting the ship, and he stared to panic, despite the fact that he’d hit rough waters yachting between Florida and the Bahamas before. “What’re you so worried about?” an older woman with hair three times as high as Carisi’s barked at him. “This is the best part. Nothing to be afraid of.”

An old man on the deck below his shouted slurs in Spanish.

Everyone on the deck lay flat on their stomachs while the waves hit the hull hard. And then in a split second the ship sank vertically into the water. Barba felt himself falling. Icy water flew up into his nose. 

He awoke with a start, in the darkness of somewhere he couldn’t be sure wasn’t Jon Cady’s trunk.

But Liv was there, sleeping, with her back to him.

He was in her bed.

His heart raced. The relief that he was neither drowning in the ocean nor suffocating in Cady’s trunk hadn’t hit him yet.

So he threw his arms around Benson.

“Rafa,” she said sleepily, dragging one of his hands to her belly, “you’re shaking.”

He buried his face in her back. She was real. He had a place beside her, at least for now, as long as she welcomed him there.

She flipped over so she was facing him. “Breathe deep, through your nose if you can,” she said. “Big deep breath where you feel your stomach getting bigger, then let it out slowly. Slowly.”

He did as she said.

“You’re in my apartment,” she assured him. “You’re safe.”

“When I wake up in the dark, I —”

“I know,” she said, her eyes full of concern, her hand reaching out to cover his heart. “You don’t have to explain.”

He had been sleeping with the lights on in his own apartment because of what the dark reminded him of, but now, at one o’clock in the morning in Olivia Benson’s bed, his brain for once didn’t lie to him: he was safe. 

“You think you can go back to sleep?” she asked, massaging his chest, a welcome pressure. “Or do you want to talk for a while? I can turn on the lights too if you’d like.”

“No, sweetheart, it’s okay.”

“Breathe,” she repeated.

With her curled up next to him, whispering reassurances, he fell asleep. 

He was awakened by the sound of Benson and Noah talking in the kitchen, and was surprised to see that it was already 7:30 in the morning, the longest he’d slept since he’d been kidnapped, maybe the longest he’d slept since he’d left New York last year, or since he’d been humiliated by the state senate. 

Rising out of bed, he pulled on his pants from the previous day and walked barefoot into the living room, where he saw Noah sitting at the kitchen counter while Benson prepared a bowl of cereal and poured a glass of milk.

He’d never wanted to be _part_ of something outside of his law school cohort or work before, and yet suddenly he longed to be a part of whatever this was, a part of this particular family.

At the same time, he felt like an intruder, someone swooping back in a year after breaking their hearts.

“Can I tell Uncle Rafa?” Noah asked when he saw Barba wander in.

“Uncle Rafa already knows,” Benson said. “But there’s an important reason I told him before I told you.”

“Why?”

“Uncle Rafa is your baby brother’s dad.”

“How come?” 

“How come?” Benson repeated, suppressing the terrified look that had briefly swept across her face.

Noah swiveled his kitchen counter chair around so he was facing Barba. “I don’t have a dad-dad, like not one who lives with us. My dad is in heaven,” he explained for Barba’s benefit, and Barba looked at Benson sideways, the two of them exchanging a glance that read _Johnny D is definitely not in heaven_. “How come my brother gets to have a dad?”

“Well,” Benson said, thinking on her feet, “Uncle Rafa just happened to make a baby, the kind that grows in my belly, with me. But that means Uncle Rafa gets to be part of our family now.” She mouthed _sorry_ in Barba’s direction. “Would you like that?”

“Okay,” Noah said reluctantly.

“This is the best family,” Barba said, joining Benson in the kitchen, eyeing the godforsaken Keurig, then turning back to the boy behind the counter, “and I didn’t have a family like this growing up, so I would love to be a part of yours.”

“You have a mom,” Noah commented. 

“I do. Her name is Lucia. She’s met your mom and I’ll bet she’d love to meet you.” He would have to make the introduction one of these days, broach the subject of forgiveness on all sides. He’d have to tell her at some point that she was going to be a grandmother. 

“Do you have a dad?”

“My dad is — with your dad, probably.”

Benson bit her lip.

“Do you love my mom?” Noah asked.

“Very much.”

“But you made her cry.”

“I did,” he admitted.

“Did you say you were sorry?” 

“A million times,” Barba said. “And I’m going to tell your mom a million more times that I’m sorry, and that I love her, if that’s all right with her.”

“And I forgave him,” Benson added. 

“So is Uncle Rafa going to come live with us when he’s my brother’s father? And —”

“I know you have a lot of questions, sweet boy, but Uncle Rafa and I still need to figure out a lot of things before the baby’s born. I promise we’ll have more answers for you soon.”

“Okay,” Noah said, shoving his spoon into his cereal, side-eying Barba.

“Trust me,” Benson said, “Uncle Rafa and I think this is very, very weird too.”

It was weird indeed. Benson had shared with Barba what her obstetrician had told her: the chances of getting pregnant without in-vitro at age fifty were only one percent; the chances of a perimenopausal woman who didn’t get a period every month getting pregnant were more like a tenth of one percent, one in a thousand. That night in December, they’d beaten 1000-to-1 odds. 

In the back of his mind, Barba could see the four of them — him, Liv, Noah, and the baby coming in September — as an unlikely, 1000-to-1 family. He hoped that all the storms would blow over.


	15. Chapter 15

Eames came to see Benson in her office on Monday afternoon. “Kozlov and I spoke to Stabler this morning,” she said. “I’m here to give you the chance to get all the stages of grief out of your system before you and I talk to Carly tomorrow.”

“And?” Benson prompted, her expectations for Stabler’s moral fortitude set necessarily low.

“He says he hasn’t seen her in three months.”

“And you and Kozlov aren’t buying that.”

“No,” Eames said, “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“He says Carly hired him as a PI because she was suspicious of Dennis. When he found out that Billy’s birth father was trying to avenge William Lewis’s death, he broke off ties with Carly.”

“Bullshit,” Benson said. “Dennis was a very useful idiot to the rest of them, obviously including Carly. He adopted Billy and had no idea that his new wife was his son’s birth mother.”

“Agreed.” Eames sat opposite Benson. “How are you doing?”

“Fine. This is just one more thing.”

“To be fair, Stabler’s clearly panicking, and we don’t think he knew what he was getting into when he agreed to work for Carly.”

“Then why didn’t he come forward when Carly’s children were murdered?”

“You want my honest answer?” Eames asked.

“Those murders are the aspect of the case that most concerns my department, so, yes.”

“He didn’t want his wife to find out he’d been sleeping with Carly,”

“So he cared more about —” She cut herself off, gritting her teeth. “You know what? Full disclosure. I had sex with Elliot Stabler once. In my car. Around 18 years ago, a month or two after my mother died. I was vulnerable and stupid and he swore he’d never cheated on his wife before.”

“You don’t need to disclose that.”

“I already told Rafael and I’ll tell Pippa too because no secret, no screwed-up version of loyalty or friendship, is more important than making sure whoever killed the Clyde children, and whoever let those murders happen, gets put away for good.”

“That’d be anger,” Eames said, pretending to count on her fingers.

“Only took me about eight years to get past denial, then.”

“We’ll make our case, Liv. We’ve got a good team here.”

—

The next morning Benson and Eames were face-to-face with Carly and her attorney Adrian Kalish, the associate at Rita’s firm who’d agreed to take on her case, in an interrogation room at 1PP. Carly had recanted her confession, but wouldn’t tell them who she was covering for, her son or her ex-boyfriend, Jon Cady.

“I need assurance of a certain degree of protection for my client,” Kalish said. “She’s in as much danger of retaliation from Cady as your special prosecutor was.”

“Cady’s in jail until his trial next month and he killed his associates,” Eames said. “Our corporate counsel representative can help protect you from Billy if you need to be.”

“I don’t need protection from my own son.”

“Carly,” Benson said, a hint of warning creeping into her voice, “Jackson told us everything two years ago.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carly said, swallowing hard.

“If Billy committed those murders, there are limits on what the law can do to him, especially here in New York,” Benson told her. “Dennis’s first wife said that he was supposed to use the money he got from faking her death to get Billy into a psychiatric hospital for children.”

“That was before Dennis and I met.”

“But Billy was your biological son. You knew Dennis long before he thought you first met.”

“I left Jon when Billy was six months old. Dennis wanted a house.” She looked at Kalish, who nodded. “I hired Elliot to get me out of Jon’s web. Elliot was the one who found out that there was a hit ordered on Talia, so I warned her. I took Dennis and the kids and we went into hiding. I never meant to imply to Talia that Dennis was the person who put the hit on her. He was too stupid to arrange something like that. He was a William Lewis fan too, but he didn’t have the right connections.”

A William Lewis fan. That infuriated Benson.

She remembered what Barba had told her and Kozlov about the conversation between Cady and his associates, the one he’d heard when he was trapped in Cady’s trunk: they wanted Talia/Teresa dead because she was smart, smarter than Dennis had ever been. So something about what Carly was saying, about how Talia had misunderstood her with regards to who was behind the hit, didn’t sit right with Benson.

“But,” Benson said, leaning forward, catching Carly’s gaze, “when Stabler told you there was a hit out on Talia, you saw an opportunity.”

“Lieutenant, we need to make a deal first,” Kalish insisted.

“Deals are up to our special prosecutor.”

“The one who is himself a kidnap victim.”

“Separate case,” Eames said.

“We’ll be challenging his appointment in court.” 

“So will Cady’s attorney,” Eames said, and Benson felt a pang of concern for Barba.

Benson turned back to Carly. “You saw an opportunity to get Dennis killed. That’s why you lied to Talia about who was behind the hit.”

“I saw an opportunity to get Dennis arrested, not killed.” Exasperated, Carly stood and pressed a hand to her forehead. Kalish warned her that if she kept talking, it was against his advice, but she continued anyway. “I’m not Jon. I don’t get people killed. I didn’t expect Talia to kill him, I swear, I just thought she’d report the hit to the police, blame Dennis, and Dennis would be arrested. Now, listen. I hired Elliot to get Cady off my back once and for all. He’d write me letters sometimes, asking me how I was doing, taunting me, and I was worried for my family.”

“When you’re the one who got your family into this in the first place?” Benson asked.

“No. A few weeks after I hired him, Elliot found out who Dennis really was. I did not know who Dennis was when I married him. I didn’t know who he was until maybe three months ago.”

Eames squinted in Carly’s direction. “That’s not possible.”

“You folks think Jon told me to marry Dennis.”

“Of course we do,” Eames said. “Jon gave Dennis your son.”

“Has anybody thought for a second that it might have been the other way around?”

“Flips your theory of the crime completely,” Kalish said.

“Dennis would have done anything for Jon. He thought Jon was his professor and didn’t even know that he wasn’t really back in law school, for God’s sake. You’re not going to believe me, but look into it: I didn’t know who Dennis and Billy really were until Elliot told me.”

Benson wrinkled her forehead. “You didn’t know that Billy was your own son?”

“I swear. His name was Lewis when he was born. I had him in our bathtub in Alabama and Jon insisted on no birth certificate. You’re looking at my name change, aren’t you? I changed my name to Carly Lewis when I came here because I didn’t want any of those people to find me, and Lewis was my son’s name, the son I’d left with Jon because I was afraid for my own safety at the hands of his hero. When Dennis came into money, I had no idea about how he got it and what he was supposed to use it for.”

“Are you telling me,” Benson said, squeezing her eyes shut, “you didn’t know that Billy, your stepson, was your _own biological son_ until a few months ago?”

“It’s unreal, isn’t it? Freaked Elliot out too.”

“Give us a few days to corroborate her story,” Eames told Kalish. “My federal investigators will comb through every detail, and will subpoena whatever Stabler found. If what Ms. Clyde says is true, we’ll talk.”

“Jon killed my kids,” Carly said.

“There’s no evidence of that,” Eames reminded her.

“I believe you,” Benson told Carly. “What you’re saying is that Jon convinced Billy to kill his younger siblings, something Billy had been threatening to do for years. When Captain Eames checks out your story, the special prosecutor is going to charge Jon with conspiracy to commit murder.”

“Conspiracy?” Carly asked.

“She’s baiting you,” Kalish warned.

“I am,” Benson said, a slight smile forming at the corners of her mouth, “because I know you didn’t kill your kids. That’s almost unheard of outside severe postpartum psychosis. If Jon told Billy to kill his siblings, or triggered those murders in any way, then Jon’s going away for life.”

“Maybe,” Carly said, “Billy’s been threatening to kill the whole family for three years, and maybe I told Dennis we were unsafe, and maybe Dennis laughed it off and refused to do anything about it. Maybe Dennis was more amused having the boy he thought was William Lewis’s son around, maybe he didn’t want me to find out that Jon had told him to ask me out and eventually marry me. And maybe for the last three years, Billy’s been in contact with his actual biological father, who’s been trying to convince him to just go through with it and kill all of us. I got the gun away from him. He was going to kill me too. He probably should have.”


	16. Chapter 16

Pippa Cox had Billy Clyde placed in a residential facility in Texas, under an agreement where his power of attorney would reside with New York City corporate counsel for the next ten years. The papers were furious that he wouldn’t be tried and convicted as an adult, but acknowledging that Jon Cady and Dennis Clyde had severely shortchanged Billy — and that Jon had turned him violent for his own bemusement — was part of their deal with Carly. 

Carly finally had the chance to grieve for her three younger children and was prepared to tell a jury everything she knew about Cady’s plans to keep William Lewis’s legacy alive. 

So although Carly’s defense attorney pulled their motion to challenge Barba’s role as federal special prosecutor, Cady’s team went forward with theirs. A judge ruled that Barba could prosecute the conspiracy case but not his own kidnapping. Cady’s team immediately appealed the decision. 

For Benson, the appeal felt like William Lewis turning everything he touched to mistrial again. For Barba, it felt like his failure to explain himself in front of the state senate. 

They found themselves in tears together one night on her couch. He kissed her and with wide eyes, swore to her that he’d make sure the case against Cady stuck, no matter what. “Don’t make promises,” she said. “I don’t want you to make a promise and then find you can’t keep it.”

Benson was grateful for two things: first, that a DNA test proved that Billy was indeed Carly’s son with Jon Cady. She’d been keeping the other possibility under lock and key somewhere at the back of her mind, and was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Second, she was grateful that the joint task force had kept her and Stabler apart as they built their case.

Barba accompanied Benson to her 20-week ultrasound. Her doctor told her that the pregnancy was professing well, and she was relieved and surprised but still worried, because nothing had ever “gone well,” or smoothly, for Olivia Benson. She’d beat 1000-to-1 odds in getting pregnant in the first place, and her chances of making it through the first trimester had only been 50/50. Now that she was at 20 weeks, the doctor assured her, her pregnancy was the same as that of a 35-year-old’s.

The day after the ultrasound, a second judge affirmed the original ruling: Barba would be allowed to prosecute Cady for conspiracy with regards to the Clyde murders, but not for his own kidnapping. 

They still weren’t together per se, Benson and Barba, but they’d been sharing a bed most Friday and some Saturday nights at Benson’s place, and on this particular Friday night, Benson ran a hand down the front of Barba’s shirt, pulling at the waistband of his pajama pants, and suggested that they celebrate the ruling. 

Barba kissed her lightly under her jawline and Benson immediately pulled him flush against her. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re feeling up to celebrating?” he said with a sweet smirk. 

She kissed him, hard, grinding against him in earnest. 

“Second trimester hormonal tension, finally kicking in,” she said. “And my breasts are much less sore, so you can do your thing.”

Barba rolled his eyes, but the color creeping up his cheeks gave him away. “We’ve only been together once and you assume —”

“Come on, Barba, are you in or not?”

His eyes darkened, and they backed up towards the bed. “I’m whatever you want, cariño —”

She plunged a hand down the front of his pants.

“Sweetheart —”

And then, when she started to stroke him, “Liv, _Olivia_.”

Benson hummed against Barba’s mouth. “I wonder how many different names I can get you to call me.” 

“All of them,” he promised. 

They still hadn’t defined their relationship, forever putting that conversation off, but with her elbows resting on the bed, him behind her, trying to muffle his own grunts (he was loud, she remembered from the first time they were together, and she had to warn him that he couldn’t be quite so loud in her apartment), she told him, “If I’d known we were this good together I’d have asked you to bend me over your desk years ago.”

“Tell me what you would have done,” he said breathlessly, rubbing her with the heel of his hand, eliciting a _yes_ from her. 

“I’d have pulled you out of your suit pants — you could have bent me over your desk, or pressed me up against the ledge by the window — Rafa — more —”

“You thought about this?” 

“A lot,” she admitted.

This time around, she didn’t kick him of bed, and they lay together, drenched in sweat, Benson playing with Barba’s chest hair, both of them catching their breaths. “I think I need a shower,” Benson said, kissing Barba’s shoulder. “Thank you for that.”

“Any time,” he said, folding his hands behind his head, a sweet, self-satisfied smirk on his lips. 

“Rafa, we are _good_ together.” She flinched. “Here, I mean.” 

“I know,” he said, raking a hand downward, over her breast and towards her hip. 

“But, listen, I need to take a shower and you’ve got less than five months to figure out how to tell your mother about the baby.”

Barba groaned. “Querida, can you not bring up my mother _now_?”

“We have so much to figure out,” she said, kissing his lips as she sat up. “This might be a good place to start.”

Barba crooked a finger in her direction, drawing her back to his lips. “I love you,” he said, “but please don’t interfere in what’s between me and my mother.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll give you time.”

She didn’t return the _I love you_. She needed more time, too. 

—

When Barba met his mother at a diner uptown on Sunday afternoon, she seemed worried. Barba hoped for the best, or at least hoped that their meeting wouldn’t open any new disastrous gulfs between them. 

Lucia hugged him. That was a surprise.

“What happened that’s so bad you had to talk to me right away?” she said, not letting go.

“It’s good news.”

“Vas a ser juez?”

“No, Mami.”

“That’s still off the table for good, then.” He let out an unintended hum, and she hugged him tighter, patting his back. “No, I’m sorry, no, I didn’t mean that.”

“I am a special prosecutor now, though.”

“I don’t want to hear about that. I don’t want to know what danger you’re in from that case. How’s your —” She tapped the side of her head.

“Much better.”

“You’re not having nightmares, are you, Rafi?”

He narrowed his eyes. 

“All right, tell me your good news.”

A hostess sat them and they ordered coffee. “Mami,” he said, “this has been unexpected, mostly unbelievable, for all of us, but in September, you’re going to be an abuelita.”

She let out a laugh. “You have a girlfriend?” she said, a look of genuine bemusement crossing her face. “A younger girlfriend?”

Barba rolled his eyes. “She’s actually two years older than I am and beat 1-in-1000 odds of getting pregnant.”

“Well, then.” Lucia wrinkled her forehead in thought, a bit of confusion mixed in. “It’s not Lieutenant Benson, is it?”

Barba grinned wryly.

“Me estas engañando. I always liked her for you. You must have broken her heart when you resigned, flushed what was left of your career down the toilet, and skipped town. Don’t joke about Lieutenant Benson.”

“I’m not.”

“That’s why you came back?” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.” You stepped up to the plate because Olivia was pregnant?”

“I came back to make amends. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant until they brought me back from Pennsylvania. Making amends is not my strong suit.”

“Then when — oh, I see, this didn’t start with a decision to be together, then.” She did the math in her head. “When you came to see me before Christmas.”

“When you didn’t want to talk to me.”

A waiter interrupted them to take their orders. When he headed to the kitchen, Barba took out his wallet, opened it, and removed a picture from Benson’s 20-week sonogram, sliding it across the table to Lucia.

“Oh my God,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand, “oh my God.”

“We’re still working out what’s between us, Liv and I, but she knows I want to be a permanent fixture in our baby’s life.”

“Lieutenant Benson — Liv — is 50? This is a miracle, Raf, you’d better take it for all it’s worth.”

“Don’t talk to me about miracles, Mami.”

She was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sorry I wasn’t in a position where —”

“I don’t want to hear apologies for that. You could stand to apologize for not answering any of my calls after what happened in the state senate.” 

“You didn’t answer any of my calls after you left without telling anyone,” she reminded him.

“You gave me the silent treatment over my being censured by the state senate and the Bar.”

“Let me finish what I was saying before,” Lucia begged him. “I’m sorry I wasn’t in a position where I could keep you safe when you were a boy. I’m not clear on how that led to you paying off a witness —”

“I didn’t pay off a witness.”

“That’s what the senators said.”

“I didn’t pay off a witness, Mami.” 

“It pains me that you threw away your career after all your abuela sacrificed for you, all she wanted for you, but —”

“But,” he echoed.

“Rafi, you’re —” She was momentarily overwhelmed as she looked down at the ultrasound picture. 

“I’m terrified,” he admitted. 

“You’re nothing like him. I’m not just saying that. _You are nothing like him_. A little around the mouth in looks, maybe, but otherwise not one thing.”

“I don’t need reassurance.” 

He did, very much so.

With a hand over her heart, Lucia looked down at the picture again. “Is anyone throwing Liv a baby shower?”

“Not that I know of.”

“She needs a registry, she needs something.”

“We are still — digesting — all of this.”

“But her little boy, I remember you told me when she took him in, he was already more than six months old. You need more for an infant, more for a newborn.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“You don’t have much time. And what are you going to do about her little boy? Did you tell him? Are you moving in with her?”

“We’ll figure it out for ourselves.”

“Yes,” she said, reaching across the table for his hand, “you do that.”

“I didn’t pay off a witness. I gave her a loan to make sure she’d appear, which is unethical, and I blame myself every day that she died of an overdose that night, and for that reason I don’t think I deserve to be a judge, I agree with the Bar on that.”

Lucia closed her eyes, then blinked them open again. “I’m proud of you, Raf.”

“What for?”

“You stopped running from yourself.”


	17. Chapter 17

When Benson saw Stabler in the hallway of the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, the former partners had not been in the same room for eight years.

Stabler looked the same, ten pounds and a bit less hair but otherwise unchanged since the day he’d unceremoniously left SVU and walked out of her life because both SVU and Olivia Benson were allegedly detrimental to his health.

When his eyes met Benson’s, he offered her a sad, almost embarrassed smile. 

She walked past him. He squinted at her for a moment. “Liv,” he said, nodding in her direction, clearly holding back an expression of shock in response to her physical state. 

She looked down, smirked, and kept walking. 

—

In court, Barba gave his opening statement, preparing the jury for the seeds of reasonable doubt that Cady’s lawyer, Hardy Lomel (another Gulf Coast transplant who’d helped file the motions that kept William Lewis out of court way back when), were going to try to plant. For a moment, Barba felt back on his game, back where he belonged.

His first witness was Elliot Stabler. 

Barba showed what must have been superhuman restraint as Stabler admitted to his affair with Carly, and told then what he’d learned about Jon Cady’s plan to keep Carly forever under his wing. 

“And Mr. Stabler,” Barba said as he wrapped up, “please tell the court why you didn’t come forward immediately after the three Clyde children were murdered.”

“I didn’t want to admit to the affair.”

That was a question Barba hadn’t brought up in trial prep.

“Thank you, Mr. Stabler,” Barba said briskly, yielding the witness to the defense. 

Barba called Kozlov, and then Benson to the stand. Both addressed and dismissed the possibility that Carly was behind the murders. The defense countered with a claim that neither witness had offered sufficient evidence of conspiracy, sufficient evidence that Cady had directly told Billy to kill his siblings, since Billy’s statements were inadmissible.

That was exactly the argument that Barba had anticipated from the defense. So far, so good.

Barba called Carly Clyde to the stand. She told her story about hiring Stabler so she could get away from Cady once and for all, and swore under oath that she had no idea that her stepson Billy was actually her biological son Lewis. Barba went through that part quickly, certain that the jury would find that detail soap-operatic and unbelievable. Finally, Carly testified that she had indeed seen the hit put out on Teresa/Talia as an opportunity to get Dennis arrested, but had never intended for Dennis or the children to be killed. 

The defense tried to establish reasonable doubt, the possibility that Carly was the co-conspirator.

Barba asked for a redirect. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing unexpected in the defense’s strategy, nothing Barba hadn’t prepared for. 

Until.

The prosecution had no more witnesses to call, so the defense called their first witness, NYPD officer Luka Nolte. 

Luka Nolte had not been on the witness list that Barba had received from Lomel a week earlier.

Barba jumped up and asked to approach the bench.

“Defense is calling an NYPD officer whose name did not come up in discovery,” he told the judge.

“That’s on the prosecution if in their due diligence they didn’t turn up Officer Nolte’s name,” Lomel said.

“I need another day. Your Honor, it’s nearly the end of the —”

“I’m not calling recess for another hour. Let Mr. Lomel call his witness, and if there’s anything that violates procedure, I’ll decide on our next steps from there.”

Barba gritted his teeth and returned to his table.

“Good afternoon, Officer Nolte,” Lomel said too-brightly after the twenty-something homicide officer was sworn in. “Can you tell us about the extent of your involvement with the investigation into the murders of the Clyde children?”

“Yes. I participated in the initial murder investigation securing the scene and assisting CSU.”

“And what were your initial observations?”

“I was on the scene when Carly Clyde told a homicide detective that Billy had shot the children.”

“The crime for which Billy Clyde has taken a plea deal as a juvenile,” Lomel said, tilting his head toward the jury. “Now, tell us, Officer Nolte, what did Ms. Clyde say while you were on the scene?”

“She was acting frantic, and gave Billy up fairly quickly, in my opinion.”

“But according to NYPD’s record of the event, the one that is being used as evidence by the prosecution in this trial, Ms. Clyde herself confessed to the crime at the scene. What happened?”

“Objection, hearsay,” Barba said, standing.

“This speaks to what Officer Nolte knows, Your Honor,” Lomel insisted.

“Overruled, but tread careful, Mr. Lomel.”

“Yes, Your Honor.” He turned back to Nolte on the stand. “You were asked to stay away from the case, weren’t you?”

“That’s correct.” 

“By whom?”

“Detective Dominick Carisi.”

A loud “what?” came from the gallery. Barba turned to look at Benson, whose fists were clenched, lips twisted in anger.

“And what reason did Detective Carisi —”

“Objection. _Hearsay_,” Barba repeated.

“I’ll rephrase,” Lomel said calmly. “What in your opinion was the reason you were asked to stay away from the case?”

“I was sleeping with Detective Carisi, who, as you know per official disclosure documents, has been in a relationship with the captain of the homicide division for at least six months.”

When Barba realized what was happening, he nearly flipped the table in front of him. 

“Objection!” he barked. “Your Honor, there is no way what comes next is not cut-and-dry hearsay.”

“I am calling a recess for now, until tomorrow morning,” the judge said, “but tomorrow, I want proof, not hearsay, and certainly not theatrics.”

“I have documentation,” Lomel said. “I have evidence that Detective Carisi logged into the NYPD system at 3AM the day after the murders and changed the initial reports. Whether he did it for Captain Kozlov or Officer Nolte, the fact of the matter is, Detective Carisi is corrupt and trying to frame my client.”

The judge stared down at Lomel. “I’ll trust you’ll submit that documentation immediately for discovery.” 

“Will do,” Lomel said.

Barba glared at him.

He recognized this legal modus operandi: tell big, bold lies that play off the jury’s internalized prejudices. 

Big, bold lies that removed detectives’ and prosecutors’ autonomy over disclosing details of their personal lives. 

Big, bold lies that the jury couldn’t unhear even if they were told to disregard a witness’s testimony. 

Barba knew William Lewis’s defense strategy inside and out. He’d studied it when he prepared to put Lewis away for life. 

And he was certain that Benson recognized it too.


	18. Chapter 18

Barba was furious by the time he walked out the back exit of the federal courthouse. 

He didn’t see Benson in the gallery, but found her on the sidewalk, looking for a cab. She linked her arm with his and clutched his hand tight. 

“You see it too,” he said, keeping his voice low even as it dripped with anger. 

“Yes.”

“Breathe, Liv.”

“I’m breathing, it’s _fine_.” She squeezed his hand hard. “What Lomel and that officer who Carisi has probably never even met just did in there was unconscionable, regardless of whether or not it’s the same strategy that got William Lewis four mistrials in eight years.”

“You know that even if there is a mistrial, Cady’s remanded until his kidnapping trial starts. I won’t let them release him when they know he’s guilty of kidnapping. The only reason they’re taking that to trial and not pleading him out is —”

“So I can be terrorized not knowing whether today is the day that some judge releases him on bail.”

“I told you, I won’t let them release him.”

“Like the first time you had Lewis in court?” she snapped.

He had no answer for that.

Of all the ways he’d done Olivia Benson wrong, letting Lewis go free that first time was by far the worst. 

She hailed them a cab. 

As the cab headed back to her apartment, she stared to cry, floods of tears she couldn’t hold back anymore.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and slid over to hold her, and her head fell to his chest, the sobs suddenly unrelenting.

“You’re safe,” he promised, fearing that if Cady walked on both the conspiracy and kidnapping charges, he might not be entirely correct.

“No, I’m not,” she said, her voice raspy and half an octave lower than usual. “I thought I could move on and have a kid and a couple of promotions and even —” She sniffled and looked up into Barba’s eyes. “He told me he’d be with me forever, and thanks to these assholes who worship him, he’s right.”

Barba kissed her lips, which were salty with tears.

“I’m sorry, Rafa.”

“What for?”

“I brought all these people who haunt my life into yours, which is why you were almost killed. And I’m sorry for what I implied before about Lewis being let go the first time. And for this,” she said, indicating her teary disposition, “I try to be the person in the room who holds it together, but that’s not happening today.”

“We’re not in a room, and it’s not fair that you’re everyone’s shoulder to cry on but no one reciprocates.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in Barba’s chest again. 

She cried through the next two red lights. Slowly lifting her head, she whispered, “that, what you just said, means more to me than all the groveling in the world.”

“Hey,” Barba said, pushing a strand of hair away from her face, “I’m going to work on a gag order tonight. Will you be all right at home?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“But I do.” He wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “I’ll come over as soon as I’m done working, I promise.”

“You make a lot of promises these days.”

Barba closed his eyes and nodded.

“But, Rafa,” she said, “you might as well carve yourself out some space in my apartment. You’re staying with me for the first three months after the baby’s born.”

“Oh?”

“You said you wanted to be a part of his life, so that means you’re going to be a part of his life when he’s waking up hungry or with a full diaper every two hours.”

“I’m in.” He kissed her cheek. “I’d like to be part of your life, too.”

She touched Barba’s face. “You are always welcome here.”

\---

Benson went home and slept for an hour, awakened by a call from Carisi. “They want us to talk about what happened in court,” he said. His voice was flat. 

“I know you and Nolte never met.”

“We didn’t. Everything that happened today was a disgusting, unethical, immoral defense strategy, the same one —”

“Barba and I both recognized exactly what Lomel was doing.”

“This is why we studied Lewis’s trials in law school.” 

“I’ll meet you at the precinct?”

“IAB’s here too, interviewing all of us. Are you sure you’re up to it?”

“Do I have a choice?” she asked. 

She texted Barba about her plans. He immediately wrote back, _Screw IAB. You should stay home and rest_.

She half-agreed with his assessment, but knew she had to be at the precinct to stand up for Carisi. 

By the time Benson, Carisi, and Kozlov spoke to IAB about launching an investigation into Luka Nolte, and Benson had tripe-checked that Jon Cady was indeed still in a federal prison, it was already after 8. Benson headed toward the subway.

She flinched when she met Luka Nolte outside the precinct. 

“I’m not … you’re not in any danger,” he tried to assure her. He was shaking.

“You shouldn’t be talking to me. Go talk to your union rep if you screwed up as badly as I’m sure you did.”

“Please, just listen,” he begged.

“No.” She waved her hand in his direction but didn’t move, not wanting him to follow her to the subway.

“If anything happens to me —”

“If you are in danger, talk to IAB. I can’t help you.”

“If anything happens to me,” he repeated, and she could see that he was genuinely scared, “the PI set it all up.”


	19. Chapter 19

On the morning of what was supposed to be the second day of Jon Cady’s conspiracy trial, Rafael Barba flew across the SVU squadroom, briefcase in hand, heading towards the conference table where Benson sat with Fin and Rollins. “Good to be back at Manhattan SVU,” he said, “where new breaks in the case always happen _when we’re already at trial_.” 

“This was a setup from the start, you said so yourself,” Benson reminded him.

“I was able to get a 48-hour continuance,” Barba said, “on account of the fact that one of my witnesses was approached last night by the defense’s star witness, is that correct?”

“You know why I couldn’t tell you.”

She’d asked him not to stay at her place after all the night before on account of the possibility of accusations of pillow talk, and figured he’d assumed that meant a new break in the case was coming. She hadn’t wanted him to overhear her conversation with an IAB official about what Nolte had said to her; Lomel was looking for a mistrial, and besides, Barba would go into protective mode if he learned that Nolte had stopped her on the street to tell her that if anything happened to him, Stabler was to blame. 

Barba’s eyes darted from side to side. “Where’s Carisi?”

“With IAB,” Fin said, standing,. “Speaking of which, I’ve got phone calls to make.”

“IAB knows that kid Nolte’s accusations were complete BS?”

“That’s what we’re working on,” Fin assured him.

“Does Carisi have an attorney with him, or just a union rep? Should I call Rita?”

“Reunite the whole William Lewis gang, why don’t you,” Benson said flatly, remaining seated, staring straight ahead at the whiteboard in front of the table. 

Barba’s face fell, all the concern in the world suddenly written on his sloping eyes. He covered Benson’s shoulder with his hand. 

“Carisi has an attorney,” Rollins told Barba, “but, this sucks.”

“I’m meeting with Lomel and Cady this afternoon. Going to give them one more chance to take a plea deal for 10 to 15 years.”

“Good luck,” Rollins said. “You know they’re after a mistrial.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“Eames has her detectives looking into Lomel. You’d better crush that asshole too.”

“Subornation of perjury is a beautiful, beautiful statute, if Eames brings me the evidence to back it up.”

“Crush him,” Rollins said.

Barba’s hand was still on Benson’s shoulder. “Hey, Lieutenant,” an officer called, holding up the phone receiver at his desk, “the chief’s been trying to reach you.”

“Great,” Benson said, sarcasm dripping through her teeth. She stood, the fact of her pregnancy now very much in front of her, and headed over to the uni’s desk.

Dodds told her that Nolte had been found dead in his apartment that morning, a single gunshot wound to the chest, through his heart. IAB would have to question Kozlov and Carisi, and Dodds was coordinating with Eames to bring Lomel in before the end of the day to find out what he knew.

_If anything happens to me, the PI set it all up._

“Kozlov and Carisi should not be suspects,” was all Benson said.

“They need to be cleared,” Dodds reminded her.

“Gunshot wound to the chest, inside his apartment. You and I both know what that means. He let the guy in, was facing him the whole time. It was someone he knew and trusted.”

_If anything happens to me, the PI set it all up._

“According to what was said in court yesterday, he knew and trusted Carisi.”

“His _lie_ was that he found out that Carisi was a corrupt cop, so even if his _lie_ was true, which it’s absolutely not, he wouldn’t have let Carisi in without a struggle.”

“Procedure dictates we rule him out. Kozlov too.”

_If anything happens to me, the PI set it all up._

“And what about what Nolte said to me last night?”

“Do you think Stabler’s capable of killing a witness?”

“No. Honestly, no.”

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but a couple of homicide detectives went to talk to Stabler this morning, after Nolte was found, and his wife says she hasn’t seen him since he left for court yesterday morning.”

Benson started to feel a bit lightheaded, as if something was slowly rotating behind her eyes. She pressed her thigh into the desk to steady herself. “To answer your next question,” she told Dodds, “I don’t know where he is, but I can think of at least three scenarios where we find him the same way they found Nolte, so let’s get some officers out to make sure none of those three scenarios happens.”

She took a deep breath. The dizziness was getting worse. _Well now_, she thought resignedly, _here’s where the big drama, the big tragedy happens._

“You okay?” Rollins asked, hurrying over.

“I’m going to call my doctor.”

Barba looked up from his phone, then stood and put an arm around her waist, escorting her to her office.

The doctor told her to go to the hospital, to check in at the obstetrics floor “just as a precaution.”

Barba accompanied her. She was silent, dazed for the entire ride over.

Four hostage situations. One sexual assault during an undercover operation gone wrong. An elaborate frame-up with DNA evidence to boot.

Her blood pressure was low. They hooked her up to a fetal monitor and arranged ECGs for her and the fetus.

“You don’t have to stay,” she told Barba.

“I do,” he insisted, squeezing her hand.

“Your meeting with Lomel and Cady is more important right now.”

“It’s not until 3. I’ve got time.”

He mentioned something about one of the residents saying that there was nothing unusual on the fetal monitor, that they were only running the ECGs out of an abundance of caution, but she wasn’t really listening.

Stabler, leaving suddenly and unexpectedly. Stabler not calling anymore, Stabler apparently giving in to his worst instincts, changing for the worse as he got older, protecting himself instead of seeking justice for the Clyde children. 

Cassidy giving up after almost three years together. Tucker wanting her to give up part of herself for his dream of living a quiet life far away from detectives and victims, when she wasn’t ready to retire until SVU was restructured. 

Cabot, returning to her life at inopportune times, usually at the other end of a case.

They ran the ECGs on Benson first, then the fetus. She was 21 weeks pregnant. She tried not to think about that. She tried not to think.

Four hostage situations, one sexual assault while working undercover, three days with William Lewis, another day with Lewis after he escaped. So, five hostage situations total, somewhat episodic, mostly repetitively traumatic.

Johnny Drake turning out to be Noah’s biological father. His credible threat to take custody of her son. 

Nothing ever ran smoothly. She and Noah were never safe. There was always some awful drama, something to terrify her, to the point she hadn’t been permitted a single six-month stretch of calm since her thirtieth birthday.

Between ages 20 and 30, she’d had some comfortable stretches of quiet normalcy, even with the spectre of Serena Benson hanging over her.

“Olivia, good afternoon,” her obstetrician said. Dr. Morgades had taken over for Dr. Haor following the latest horrendously coincidental conflict of interest to strike Benson’s life, only the latest in a series of horrendous coincidences. 

Dr. Morgades was standing by the bed, removing the fetal monitor, _smiling_. “Good news. You’re both fine.”

Benson almost didn’t know how to process that, how to find relief in the doctor’s assurance.

“Sometimes your heart can skip a beat when you’re under stress, temporarily lowering your blood pressure. It’s mostly a harmless arrhythmia, but you have to be careful about the dizziness. But,” she said, looking right at Benson, “you’re fine.”

“I’m fine,” she repeated, still not entirely believing it.

Barba returned to the room, his tie in his right hand, his phone in the left, the first few buttons on his dress shirt undone. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“She’s fine,” Dr. Morgades said. 

The doctor explained the drop in blood pressure to Barba while Benson slowly got out of the bed and started to gather her clothing. 

When the doctor left, Barba breathed a sigh of relief, flashing a relaxed smile at Benson, with teeth and corner-eye wrinkles and everything she loved but so rarely saw on his face.

“My mother called,” Barba said, licking his upper lip, “and, she, um, wants to talk to you.”

“You told her I was here?”

“She knew.”

“How?”

“One of the cardiac nurses is her friend’s niece. HIPAA doesn’t apply when Lucia Barba’s involved.”

“We’ll get into that later,” Benson said, narrowing her eyes. “You have a meeting.”

Barba’s phone rang, and he removed it from his pocket. “She’s calling again. She’s worried.”

Benson reached for the phone. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Barba,” she said.

“Call me Lucia. My son loves you, we’re family now. Are you all right? I don’t mean to be nosy, but what’s happening?”

“We’re great,” Benson told her. “They had me come here as a precaution, and now I’m going home. The baby and I are in good shape.”

“Thank God. I promise I won’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong again. I was worried. I know you’ve been through a lot, and you should have some peace. You deserve it.”

She choked up a little in response to that. “Thank you, Lucia.”

“We don’t know each other well, but you taught me something, Olivia. If you can forgive Rafael for taking off last year, so can I.”

—

Barba rode home with Benson in a cab. He was already starting to think of her place as _home_, and they’d probably have to have a talk about that, along with many, many other aspects of their evolving relationship, someday soon, someday after they nailed Jon Cady to a wall without a mistrial. 

When Benson was comfortably relaxing on the couch — he was sure she’d start working as soon as he left, but at least he saw her relax for ten minutes — he headed to Rikers to talk to Cady and Lomel. He offered 10 to 15 years.

“Concurrent with the kidnapping charges, if he’s convicted of those,” Lomel said. He knew what he was doing. He always knew what he was doing.

“I’m not allowed, for obvious reasons, to make a deal with regard to those charges.”

“That’s right, I forgot,” Lomel sneered. “We are following those all the way to trial.”

_You’ll have to testify about being thrown a trunk and believing for a good ten minutes that you were going to be driven off a bridge with your hands bound,_ was what Lomel was really trying to say. _You take Cady down, we’ll make sure you suffer._

“My colleagues will not go for a concurrent sentence, but I am not allowed to discuss that any further. 10 to 15 for conspiracy, given the horrific nature of the murders, a gift, and you know that, Mr. Lomel.”

“How’s your 48-hour continuance going, Mr. Barba?” Lomel asked snidely. “I see you’re already wasting your time having your detectives look into me and my finances, something SVU probably should have done with Dennis and Carly Clyde years ago. Your friend Lieutenant Benson could have easily prevented this tragedy.” 

Cady smiled, a wistful but apparently carefully-thought-out expression. “Carly’s the one who fooled everyone into thinking she was a perfect Instagram-model mom,” he said, laughing, “with a perfect family and two perfect houses that were acquired under perfectly-legal circumstances.”

He laughed exactly like Lewis. That was learned, self-taught, rehearsed, and yet it brought up a fury in Barba that he hadn’t revisited in many years.

“Carly snowed everyone over,” Cady insisted. 

“We know for a fact that Dennis pursued her because you told him to,” Barba said, “so regardless of whatever perfection Carly may or may not have portrayed on Instagram, Dennis is the one who snowed everyone over, with you standing behind him the whole time.”

“Dennis is a moron.”

“Regardless, Dennis snowed everyone over, including Carly, on your orders, and I will prove that in court beyond a shadow of a doubt, which means it’s in your best interest to settle.”

Cady laughed again. “Dennis is dead, and so is Officer Nolte, I hear. Did you look into your guy Carisi on that? Rumor has it that Detective Carisi is a one-man hotbed of corruption.”

Barba glared at Cady, then at Lomel. “You two forget that I am the only prosecutor who got a guilty verdict and a sentence for William Lewis.”

“Not the full guilty verdict you wanted,” Cady taunted.

“He got 25 to life, the only trial of his that made it past a jury. You forget that I know Lewis’s tactics like the back of my hand.” He grabbed his briefcase and headed for the door. “William Lewis is long dead. For your own sake, I’d recommend leaving him that way.”


	20. Chapter 20

Barba jogged into his office with a thermos of coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. He needed to file motions that would force the jury to disregard everything that the late Officer Nolte had testified to in court, but it was after 6, which meant that the motions would not be filed until nine o’clock the next day, only twenty-four hours before Cady’s trial was set to resume. 

He thought about requesting an additional continuance so that Lomel could be investigated by the feds for suborning perjury, but that would play into the defense’s shady, Lewis-esque strategy. Investigating Lomel would lead to an immediate mistrial, probably the William Lewis Fan Club’s endgame all along.

Lewis’s courtroom playbook was forever at the back of Barba’s mind on account of his and the court’s failure to protect Benson six years ago.

But he had no time to think about that now. He wanted to draw up the motions so that they could be delivered first thing in the morning, and then return home to Olivia.

He wanted to get home to Olivia.

That thought had a nice ring to it.

As he flopped into his office chair, he quickly checked his news alerts. Under “Health”: _Study Suggests Drinking Coffee Makes Your Penis Stronger._

He smirked, sipped his coffee, and licked his lips.

Anyway. 

He was fully absorbed in his work on the motions when he heard a knock on his half-open door. 

Looking up, he saw Elliot Stabler shutting the door behind him.

“Mr. Stabler, you should not be here without your attorney present,” Barba said, alarm creeping into his chest, unease settling into whatever was left of his soul. He remembered Cady’s men stomping into his apartment, smashing his head into the kitchen counter, and he absolutely did not want to remember that, and he absolutely did not want to be vulnerable, cornered, ever again. 

As Stabler approached his desk, Barba grabbed his phone and clutched it with his right hand under his desk.

“I need to tell you —”

“Mr. Stabler,” Barba repeated, swallowing the painfully dry lump in his throat, “your attorney would advise against you meeting me here privately. Please don’t incriminate yourself.”

“You think I killed Nolte? Ask Liv what she thinks. She’ll set you right.”

“Do not bring Liv into this.”

Stabler tilted his head to the side. “You?” he asked, the word tinged with both accusation and astonishment.

“Excuse me?”

“No offense, but I never would have expected — never would have made you for —”

Barba blinked. “Full offense,” he snapped.

“I came here to tell you that I had nothing to do with whatever the hell happened to Nolte.”

“He was murdered. Shot to death in his own apartment, probably by someone he knew.”

Barba’s hand, the one that was clutching his phone, trembled. He didn’t let Stabler see.

“I’ll own up to working with Lomel to get a mistrial on this case,” Stabler said.

“I thought you worked for Carly.”

“I work for whoever pays me.”

“A pinnacle of ethics these days, aren’t you?” Barba chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment, restraining himself. “The reason your attorney doesn’t want you to “own up” to working with Lomel is that I’ll charge you with suborning perjury.”

“Does it matter anymore?”

Lomel had Barba and the court cornered. The judge would either declare a mistrial because Nolte’s testimony suggested much more than reasonable doubt or would declare a mistrial because the defendant’s attorney had worked with a private investigator to suborn perjury. 

A mistrial no matter what.

William Lewis’s strategy was still haunting the courts, still working. Meanwhile, Lomel didn’t seem to care that he was risking his own freedom. He probably knew people on the inside.

Barba shuddered. 

If Lomel knew people inside federal prisons, and those prisoners had connections on the outside, then he certainly could have ordered a hit on Nolte himself.

“I’m coming clean,” Stabler said, as if he expected a medal.

“About three months too late.”

“I didn’t know how much danger Carly’s kids were in. She downplayed what was going on with Billy a lot. If I’d known —”

“She had the same spiral arm fracture three times. Her son was pushed down the stairs. The little boy, Jackson, he was SVU’s first witness, the first person who brought the family to SVU’s attention. That little boy didn’t live to see his tenth birthday. You worked for SVU for so many years, Stabler, you had to have suspected something.”

“It’s different when you’re a private investigator.”

“So outside of SVU, nobody owes anything to children whose lives are in danger? I’ll meet with you and your lawyer in the morning. If you give me Lomel, I’ll plead you out on suborning perjury, which’ll get you six months to two years, as opposed to conspiracy to suborn perjury. The conspiracy change will be much less pleasant.”

Stabler stood up and cleared his throat. “I understand.”

“See you in the morning.”

“I’ll bring my lawyer.”

“I’m going to request a full allocution from you, including an apology to Detective Carisi.”

An apology and allocution from Stabler would give Carisi solid ground on which to sue both Stabler and Lomel for defamation of character. 

“And,” Barba added, “because I’m feeling kind, I’ll warn you not to tip off Lomel. If he killed Nolte himself, you may be next.”

“I can take care of myself,” Stabler said, shutting the door behind him as he left the office.

The next day, Stabler and his lawyer would appear before the court to plead guilty to suborning perjury. Lomel would immediately ask for a mistrial, and the judge would surely grant it. 

Mistrial.

Mistrial no matter how you looked at it.

The endgame all along, with the added benefit of smearing a detective involved in the case. 

Barba pitched his legal pad at the door, rattling the horizontal blinds that covered the glass window. 

He hoped — prayed — that the federal judge handling Cady’s kidnapping trial would maintain remand so that Cady would stay prison. 

Barba couldn’t push to get that trial moved up, because he himself was the victim in that case, yet another mistrial waiting to happen. 

He would have to testify, and they’d find ways to smear him too. They’d make him panic, make him break down on the stand in front of the person to whom he’d made a thousand promises about keeping Cady in jail. 

He knew he was letting Olivia down, he knew he was failing her again, and yet this time, his instinct was to go to her, not move on, not run away.


	21. Chapter 21

“I’m sorry, Liv,” Barba said, loosening his tie. She was in bed, under the comforter, half asleep. He had just returned from a meeting with Eames and the federal attorney who would be prosecuting Cady’s kidnapping case, the one where Barba himself was the victim, the one where Barba would have to testify if there was any hope at all of Cady remaining in prison. That afternoon, the judge in the Clyde murder case had declared a mistrial, to the delight of Lomel and what was left of the William Lewis Fan Club. “Liv,” he repeated, removing his pants and dress shirt and climbing into bed next to her, “I’m sorry, I know I failed you, but the next step —”

“You didn’t fail me, you idiot,” she mumbled, flipping over and opening her eyes to look up at Barba. “Stabler failed Carly and Dennis’s three children, and what he did to Carisi was inexcusable. I also believe he sent a young officer in debt to his death by setting up that testimony.”

Barba shrugged and avoided her gaze.

“Rafa, honey,” Benson said, sitting up, “look at me.”

He flinched, but turned to look at her, reflexively nuzzling his nose to her cheek as he did. 

“Cady went after you, and you’re the victim who will be testifying at his kidnapping trial,” she said slowly, carefully articulating each word. “He set what happened to the Clydes in motion fifteen years ago, and no matter how naive we want to say Dennis was, he set this in motion too. He failed a lot of people with his lies of omission.”

Barba sniffed harshly. “When I was inside that trunk and for two minutes I _knew_ that Cady was going to drive off that bridge, I thought, well, after what I did to you last year —”

“Don’t you dare.”

He continued anyway, fighting back tears. “I thought I might have deserved it.”

“No. That’s not true, that’s absolutely not true, and if you believe it for a second, you’ll make a terrible witness.”

He drew her closer, clinging to her, guilt welling up in his eyes and stomach. 

“You’ll do fine,” she promised him.

“They’re not going to settle. They’ll take the kidnapping charges to trial, and they’ll make sure that the only thing standing between Cady and freedom is my testimony. I can’t do that to you.”

“You’ll do fine,” she said again, and he wasn’t sure of the degree to which she believed that. 

“Do you want to talk to Stabler?” he asked. “I can arrange something before the allocution.”

“No,” she said sharply.

“Okay.”

“I don’t know whether Stabler’s changed or whether he’s exactly the same person he was when he was my partner for twelve years, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is what he did, and what he didn’t do. I care too much about Sonny, and I care too much about that little boy Jackson Clyde who never had a chance, to ever speak to Stabler again.”

Barba buried his head in her shoulder. “I’m sorry to lay this all on you. You’ve had a rough few days.”

“The doctor says I’m fine,” she assured him, “but you’re not fine. You have to deal with what happened. If you can’t put Cady away as a prosecutor, you’ll put him away as a witness. I have faith in you.”

“I can’t — I can’t talk about this anymore right now, not now,” he said, angry with himself for the stammer, the hesitation, the fact that he couldn’t face down his own trauma, which was nowhere near what Benson had been through.

“Don’t do that to yourself,” she said, as if reading his mind. She lifted her hand to his cheek and traced his stubble with her thumb, not letting go of his gaze for even a moment. “You were thrown into the trunk of a car” — she swallowed hard, choking on the memory — “and when they told me what Cady tried to do, my heart broke for you.”

She leaned towards him and kissed his lips, the kiss smooth and languorous. He felt tears hot on his cheeks, and he knew that she felt them too. 

“I love you, Rafa. I should have been more forgiving when we saw each other in December.”

“No,” he said through tears, “no, I shouldn’t have left. I took off. I used your emotional support while I was being raked over the coals by the state senate and the Bar, and then I took off, instead of being there for you.” 

She pressed her forehead to his. “What Cady did to you was not punishment for that, do you hear me?”

“I know,” he said, and he _knew_, but that didn’t change how he _felt_. 

He’d failed her, and now his testimony was all that was left to keep Cady behind bars. 

He was determined to testify. Kidnapping meant five years, conspiracy to suborn perjury another five. That gave federal prosecutors a full decade to nail Cady to the wall, to put him away for life for the conspiracy that had led to the murder of the three Clyde children.

“Hey,” Benson said, “we learned the other day at the hospital that in spite of what the past may have taught us, not everything is catastrophic.”

“We did.” For a moment he beamed at her, and even though the terror of being on the witness stand for Cady’s kidnapping trial still flooded his soul, Olivia’s assurances, her presence, momentarily halted the fear seeping in. 

He briefly closed his eyes, and she made a soft shushing sound, as if trying to calm him, something else he wasn’t sure if he deserved. 

“But we don’t have to think about it any more tonight,” she said. 

She hugged him, and held on for at least a minute, letting him cry with his eyes shut tight, buried in her shoulder. 

They were quiet for a long while after that. She dozed off; he stared at the ceiling. At some point she curled up next to his shoulder. 

“Have you slept?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

She pressed a hand to his chest, over his undershirt. “Please don’t worry, not tonight. The prosecutors will refile on the conspiracy charges, and —”

“I need a few days off from thinking about that.” He flipped back over onto his side. “I read an article the other day.”

“About Cady?”

“I told you, I need a few days off from thinking about Cady. In fact, I didn’t read the article, just the headline, but it was important medical news.”

He smirked. She laughed. 

“Study Suggests Drinking Coffee Makes Your Penis Stronger.”

A smile spread across her face. “Stronger?”

“Stronger.”

“So, should I get you going and then we’ll see how many law books we can balance on it?”

“Dear God.”

“I have five-pound weights under the bed. Might have some tens in the storage room, too. Do you think you can drink enough coffee where your penis can lift weights?”

Hands intertwined, facing each other, they were laughing together, a welcome respite from news of mistrials and witness testimony. 

“You do drink a lot of coffee,” she commented.

“A lot.”

“Push ups,” she said, smiling against his mouth. “Or —”

“Oh no.” 

“Baseball!”

“Tennis,” he corrected, lifting his hips off the bed and shifting them as if swinging a racket back and forth. 

“I’m sure you drink enough coffee where it can handle both. You really can’t sleep?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head.

“You want to do something else?” She palmed him through his underwear, then teased, “My _strong_ prosecutor.” 

“You think flattery will distract me?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. You’re right. Tell me again how strong I am.”

“How do you even walk with this thing?” she said, unable to suppress a laugh at the end of her exaggerated question.

He sat up, then gently pulled her into his lap and kissed his way up her neck. “I should stick with four cups a day, then, yeah?” 

“If the clickbait says so. Come on, Barba,” she said, rocking her own hips back against him.

“Strong enough for you?”

“I mean, you got a 50-year-old perimenopausal woman pregnant, so who’s to say the clickbait isn’t right?”

Barba smiled, showing all his teeth. “Liv.”

“You are pretty … strong … though, you know that? Strongest I’ve experienced.”

“Coffee and flattery make it stronger.”

She kissed him hard and helped him slide his boxers down his legs, then climbed back on top of him. “Show me.”

He thrust his hips up towards her again. “Liv?”

“Yes?” she said, the question ending in a delighted hiss.

“I love you.”

She took his face in both of her hands and continued to rock against him. “Always, sweetheart,” she promised. “Always.”


	22. Chapter 22

On a Thursday evening in August, an hour before sunset, two terrified people near the midcentury point of their lives walked arm in arm across the campus of Hudson University, with an entirely untroubled seven-year-old concentrating on a rainbow-sprinkled ice cream cone twenty steps ahead. Benson was four weeks from her due date; Barba was fourteen hours from testifying against the man who’d tried to kill him.

She knew he was terrified because he, unlike Noah, hadn’t ordered any ice cream from the truck that parked in the law school building’s parking lot on summer weeknights. Barba was never one to turn down dessert. 

“I have a name picked out,” Benson said, patting Barba’s forearm, hoping to distract him for a few moments. She’d picked the same weeks ago, but the events of the last ten years had taught her not to plan ahead, to expect that the rug would invariably be pulled out from under her. Barba’s return, though, had been different, unprecedented: at a time when he couldn’t be sure about anything, Barba had sworn that he’d found a measure of certainty in her and the baby, and Benson believed him. She trusted him when she thought her capacity for trust was long gone.

She trusted him even after she’d been betrayed for a third time by Elliot Stabler.

And she trusted that Barba’s testimony would put Jon Cady away for at least twenty years, even though much of her history told her she shouldn’t.

“If it’s Rafael Junior, I’m vetoing it immediately,” he said, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth.

“Assistant District Attorney Rafael Barba Junior,” she said, cringing when she realized her mistake.

“Hey.” He turned to face her, quickly rubbing her shoulder with his free hand. “As of September, it’ll be Federal Attorney Rafael Barba.”

“Really?”

“As much as I’ve enjoyed teaching classes this summer, Hudson hasn’t offered me anything permanent. Captain Eames made some calls on my behalf. They made me an offer for a full-time, salaried position as a federal prosecutor.”

“They must have thought you did a good job prosecuting the conspiracy case.”

“The conspiracy case was a shitshow.” Barba shuddered, reflexively grasping Benson’s hand. “That’s why they need me tomorrow. One count kidnapping, two counts murder two. I was a witness — an ear-witness, I suppose — to the murders. If they find him guilty on the kidnapping, he’ll get ten years. On the murders, he’ll be put away for twenty, maybe more.”

“I’ll be right there with you tomorrow,” she said.

“We’re dealing with Lomel and Cady here. You’ll hear some things you won’t like.”

“Such as?”

He looked ahead to make sure Noah was out of earshot. “They’ll bring up Carisi.”

“He’s been thoroughly investigated by IAB. Everyone knows the corruption accusations are bogus.”

“They’ll bring those up,” Barba said, tilting his head to the side, “and —”

“You don’t have to —”

“Lomel will almost certainly bring it up on the stand, if he knows, and I’m sure that somehow he knows.”

“That was a difficult year for all of us.”

“You knew?”

“I’m a trained detective,” she said, repeating an old joke. “I saw you two get into a cab together that night, the day of Dodds’s funeral.”

Barba blinked his eyes closed. “It’s funny, I —”

“I thought Ed represented stability, something definite, the sort of sure thing I’d never had. I was settling, and they say at some point you have to settle, you have to stop being so full of yourself. I was in love with my best friend, and I was afraid we’d send the whole DA’s office crashing to the ground if we got together. I was afraid you and I would make the same mistake I’d made with David Haden years ago, on a much larger scale.”

“Regardless of the winding roads that brought us here,” Barba said, “I’m glad we’re here, together, now.”

“Rafa,” she said, laying a hand across his back, “the day before you testify is the worst. The anxiety is much worse now than when you’re actually up there. I promise.”

“What’s the baby’s name?” he asked. “Tell me.”

“You’ll laugh. It’s from a book. A romance novel.”

“Olivia Benson reads romance novels?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me yet.”

“I look forward to learning more.”

“That gestational diabetes test I had to take a few weeks ago, the second one, was tough: six hours sitting in the waiting room, getting a blood test every hour after drinking an orange drink with something like 100mg of sugar in it.”

“If they want to see how well you digest 100mg of sugar, they might as well let you eat an entire small Carvel cake.”

“You know exactly how much sugar is in a small Carvel cake?”

He held his arms out to the side as if to say, _you know me_, and she laughed. “Anyhow, the doctor said they lowered the threshold so almost no one over 35 passes the first test. I knew it was going to be a long day, so I downloaded Kindle romances.”

“Kindle romances,” he repeated, smirking.

“They’re entertaining when you need to be entertained, and sometimes miles ahead of Harlequins. Light reading and lots of fun stuff.”

“I’d have never taken you for the romance novel smut type,” Barba teased.

Benson rolled her eyes. “Let people enjoy things.”

“You lay out on the beach reading romance novels?” Barba asked with half-feigned swarthiness.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Barba clicked his tongue.

“I started reading this one novel that had a little more … content … than I expected.”

“Sex,” Barba whispered.

“No, asshole. I mean it had more emotional content than I expected. It was about second acts in life. In any case, I liked the main character’s name, and it sounds good with “Barba”.” 

“You’re giving the baby my last name?”

“You’re his father.”

Barba swallowed hard. “I’m going to testify tomorrow,” he said, squaring his own shoulders, “and Cady’s going to be put away for a long time.”

“Good,” Benson said, patting Barba’s arm, “good.”

“So, the name?”

“Gabriel Santiago Barba.”

Barba looked at the cement beneath his feet. “My grandmother was from Santiago de Cuba, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“I hope I haven’t —”

“You haven’t disappointed her, Rafa.”

They walked in silence for a minute or two, watching Noah stop in front of them to investigate rocks on the quad. “Thank you, Liv,” Barba said.

“For —”

“For letting me come back.”

—

He testified the next morning. The prosecution successfully shut down every attempt Lomel made at going after Barba’s personal life. He did manage to get in a “is it true that you were nearly disbarred for bribing a witness to appear in court?”, and Benson, sitting in the gallery, looked like she might have punched Lomel in the head if given the opportunity.

But Barba made it through his testimony, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding Cady guilty on all three counts. He’d be sentenced to 20 to 25 years, a better outcome than Barba had expected, and Barba planned to re-file the conspiracy charges when he started his permanent position as federal prosecutor in the fall.

As they lay in bed that evening, Benson whispered, “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

Barba rolled onto his side, resting a hand on her belly, leaning in for a gentle kiss. “Does it feel over yet? With Lewis, I mean.”

“It’ll never feel over,” she admitted.

“I understand.”

“But the last remnant of him — Jon Cady — is going away for at least 20 years.”

“Life, after we get him on conspiracy.”

“Thank you. Someone needs to stand up for the Clyde kids, for their memory.”

They heard footsteps in the hall, followed by Noah in the doorway complaining that he couldn’t sleep. 

“Why not, sweet boy?” Benson asked.

Unprompted, Noah climbed in bed and lay down between them. 

Benson and Barba looked at each other and shrugged.

“Did the bad guy who kidnapped you get put in jail?” Noah asked Barba.

“For a very long time.”

He turned to Benson. “Was he the same bad guy who kidnapped you before I was born?”

“No,” Benson said, “he wasn’t. But neither of those guys can hurt us.”

“You’re six,” Barba said, “and —”

“Almost seven.”

“Almost seven, but you’re a kid. Go be a kid, and let the grownups worry about the grownup stuff, and let us keep you safe.”

Benson gave Barba a wistful look. 

As kids, neither of them had the luxury of grownups in their lives who made it so they didn’t have to worry about grownup stuff.

“Mom,” Noah said, in a half-whisper, was my dad a _bad guy_?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know,” Noah said with a shrug, but he’d clearly overheard things that he wasn’t supposed to overhear. 

Benson sighed. “Yes,” she said, “but you’re not ready to hear more until you’re older. My dad was a bad guy too. That’s why I try to make sure you get all the love in the world, because you, Noah, you’re a good guy.”

“Is Uncle Rafa a good guy too?”

“Of course.”

“Even though he got in trouble and almost couldn’t be a lawyer anymore and ran away from us?”

“Noah!”

“I don’t know,” was all Noah could say in response.

“Sweet boy, Uncle Rafa came back, and I promise you, he is a good guy.”

“But how come you got in trouble?” Noah asked. “Everybody was saying you were in a lot of trouble.”

“Stupid grownup things,” Benson said before Barba could answer. “And remember, Uncle Rafa came back.”

“To be my brother’s dad.” He looked over at Barba. “Since my first dad was a bad guy and you’re not, can you be my dad instead?”

Barba turned to Benson with wide eyes that were practically falling out of his skull. He nodded at her, silently asking for permission to answer _yes_.

Benson beamed.

“I’d be honored,” Barba said.

—

Benson joked that giving birth at age 51 was the least dramatic event of her adult life. 

Gabriel Santiago Barba was born at 3AM after four hours of labor, pushed out easily following an epidural that kicked in exactly on time. 

When Benson and Gabriel were cleaned up and resting comfortably in their hospital room, Barba casually proposed marriage to Benson. “Not out of any old-fashioned impulse,” he assured her when he saw the surprise written on her face, “but because I love you and I love having a family with you. So even if you don’t want to get married, I’ll always be grateful for what I have with you. But —”

Benson bit her lip. “If we get married, you can adopt Noah.”

“Yes.”

“Rafael.”

“Hm?”

“You are an honorable man. Never let anyone, including yourself, tell you otherwise. I can’t wait to marry you, as long as you promise never to run away in the middle of a crisis again, and as long as you promise to clean up at least half of the diaper blowouts.”

“I do,” he said, a relaxed smile on his face — hers, too — finally.


End file.
